Adventures of the Spirit
Adventures of the Spirit
The Older Woman in the Works of Doris Lessing,
Margaret Atwood, and Other Contemporary
Women Writers
Edited by
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
The Ohio State University Press
Columbus
Copyright © 2007 by The Ohio State University.
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Adventures of the spirit : the older woman in the works of Doris Lessing, Margaret
Atwood, and other contemporary women writers / edited by Phyllis Sternberg
Perrakis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978–0–8142–1064–2 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Canadian fiction—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. American fiction—
Women authors—History and criticism. 3. Canadian fiction—20th century—History
and criticism. 4. Canadian fiction—21st century—History and criticism. 5. American
fiction—20th century—History and criticism. 6. American fiction—21st century—
History and criticism. 7. Women and literature. 8. Self-consciousness (Awareness) in
literature. 9. Older women in literature. 10. Old age in literature. I. Perrakis, Phyllis
Sternberg.
PR9188.A38 2007
810.9'9287—dc22
2007021566
This book is available in the following editions:
Cloth (ISBN 978–0–8142–1064–2)
CD-ROM (ISBN 978–0–8142–9142–9)
Cover design by Melissa Ryan
Text design by Juliet Williams
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American
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Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992.
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C ontents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
vii
1
Part I Doris Lessing: Spiraling the Waves of Detachment
1. “Sleepers Wake”: The Surfacing of Buried Grief in Doris Lessing’s
love, again, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and
Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters
Virginia Tiger
27
2. Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis
47
3. Through the “Wall”: Crone Journeys of Enlightenment and
Creativity in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Keri
Hulme, and Other Women Writers
Sharon R. Wilson
83
Part II Margaret Atwood: Doubling Back Through the Labyrinth
4. Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure
Earl G. Ingersoll
105
5. “And They Went to Bury Her”: Margaret Atwood’s The Blind
Assassin and The Robber Bride
Debrah Raschke and Sarah Appleton
126
6. Atwood’s Space Crone: Alchemical Vision and Revision in
Morning in the Burned House
Kathryn VanSpanckeren
153
Part III Spiritual Adventuring by Other Contemporary Women Writers
7. “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”: Fay Weldon’s Elder Fairy Tale
Roberta Rubenstein
183
8. On the Road Again: Aritha Van Herk’s No Fixed Address and
Suzette Mayr’s The Widows
Sally Chivers
200
9. So Much Depends Upon a Ya-Ya Scrapbook: Trauma, Figured
and Reconfigured
Sandra Singer
216
0.Surviving the Colonialist Legacy of the Klondike Gold Rush: A
1
Native Woman Elder’s Liberatory and Integrative Storytelling Turn
Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez
241
1.“Soul Murder” and Rebirth: Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination
1
in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
Jeanie E. Warnock
270
Notes on Contributors
Index
299
303
A cknowledgments
Many people and ideas have contributed to the genesis of this collection. My original idea for the book and my work on chapter 2 owe
much to the intellectually bracing and spiritually enlivening climates of
two study groups initiated by my friend Mark Keedwell—first one on
Ken Wilber and then an ongoing study group on Sufism.
I wish to thank my friend and colleague Jeanie Warnock for her
help with copyediting the first version of the completed manuscript
of this volume. As well, she read an earlier version of chapter 2 and
offered a number of insightful suggestions for revisions. My friend
Christine Zerbinis, herself a professional editor, lent her expert skills to
copyediting the revised version of the manuscript. Chapter 2 was also
read and commented on by my friend and colleague Debrah Raschke
and by Mark Keedwell.
To all my contributors I owe a special note of thanks. They patiently,
at times even enthusiastically, cooperated with me in the sometimes
laborious process of birthing this book. Their responsiveness to my
initial idea of writing about the retrospective spiritual adventuring of
midlife and older women characters in works by contemporary women
authors, their unique development of their own approaches to this
topic, and their willingness to refine and revise their efforts have all
contributed immensely to the final volume. Many of these contributors
belong to the Doris Lessing Society or the Margaret Atwood Society of
the MLA, and I wish to thank both societies for their work in promoting scholarship on these writers.
vii
viii
Acknowledgments
My own chapter benefited from the stimulation of colleagues in
the Doris Lessing Society. An early version of the first half of chapter
2, on Memoirs of a Survivor, was presented at the First International
Doris Lessing Conference in New Orleans in April 2004, and an early
version of the second half of the chapter, on Shikasta, was presented at
the MLA in Philadelphia in December 2004, at the session titled “Doris
Lessing: Prophet or Maverick?” sponsored by the Lessing Society.
Finally, I wish to thank my husband of thirty-seven years, Stelios
Perrakis, with whom life has always been an adventure. His warmth,
charisma, and humor, in particular, have enlivened the spiritual adventures of my midlife and older years. My life’s course has also been
immensely enriched by the experience of sharing my journey with that
of my two sons, Evan and Dan, and, more recently, my daughter-inlaw, Gaby, and granddaughters, Sophia and Zoe. I want to thank each
of them for allowing me to participate in their journeys and grow with
them. I wish each of them a life filled with spiritual adventures at each
age and stage of their life passage.
I ntroduction
P hyllis S ternberg P errakis
Carolyn Heilbrun, lamenting the lack of opportunities for older women
to find “something new, something not yet found” in their lives, comments that “if we could discover a word that meant ‘adventure’ and
did not mean ‘romance,’ we in our late decades would be able to free
ourselves from the compulsion always to connect yearning and sex. . . .
The reason for the predominance of sexual aspiration, I have decided,
is that no other adventure has quite the symbolic force, not to mention
the force of the entire culture, behind it” (103). Contrary to Heilbrun’s assumption, this volume suggests that Doris Lessing, Margaret
Atwood, and other contemporary women writers illuminate a new
kind of midlife and older woman’s adventure, one that is spiritual in
nature, enabling new ways of being and becoming, but open-ended
and capable of great variation in practice. These journeys of the spirit
do not leave behind the body; indeed, they are often posited on the
variations in the body as it ages and decays, forcing the protagonists
to confront the slippage between what they can imagine of, and for,
themselves and their painful reality.
Very often the contemplation of physical and/or mental loss sets in
motion a retrospective movement—a long look back as the woman of
a certain age tries to assess where she has come from, assimilate the
twists and turns along the way, and decipher a shape or pattern to
the journey. At times the process of seeking this pattern precipitates
a breakthrough to a new, more capacious sense of self, an acceptance
of modes of self-knowing or being not possible earlier. Sometimes the
process of reassessment is slow and thoughtful; at other times it is
Introduction
quickened, propelled by a traumatic experience or a sudden loss that
heightens the awareness and shatters old psychic barriers. These inner
journeys occur at different levels of development and reach different
stages of self-awareness, revealing not only the challenges and difficulties of the older years for women but also the unique opportunities that
such challenges provide to acquire a new perspective on one’s self and
one’s life—to find (or make) a place or space, a vantage point, from
which to view one’s past, one’s sense of self, even the workings of one’s
mind.
My understanding of spirit and of the formulation of this space of
detachment comes in part from the work of Ken Wilber,1 a theoretician of consciousness. Integrating and extending the various maps of
self-development of many thinkers, including Erik Erikson, Abraham
Maslow, and Carol Gilligan, Wilber has formulated a comprehensive theory of both individual and collective, subjective and objective
evolution.2 Dividing all of evolutionary development into nine nested
spheres or waves of developing consciousness along the river of life
from matter to spirit, Wilber posits nine stages of expanding individual
development, each of which consists of a different worldview experienced by the self inhabiting or identifying with that stage. These stages
begin in infancy and continue over an individual’s entire life. However, they are not rigidly separated from one another, and individuals
do not necessarily pass through all the stages.
The first six basic stages of the evolution of consciousness, some
form of which is common to almost all developmental schemes, begin
with infancy and continue over an individual’s whole life. The first
three are associated with the “archaic” (“hatching of the physical self”),
“magical” (“birth of the emotional self”), and “mythical” (“birth of
the conceptual self”) worldviews of the infant, toddler, and young child
(Wilber, Brief History 147–53). While these stages are not as relevant
to this study as the worldviews of later domains of self-identity, we
do see aspects of the mythic worldview in the tribal identity of the
aboriginal woman discussed by Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez in chapter
10. The next three stages—the rule/role, conventional self (concerned
with social scripts); the worldcentric, postconventional self (able to
judge and think for oneself); and the centaur, integrating self (able to
integrate body and mind)—are the major focus of this study. It is not
uncommon in the fictional characters discussed, as in life, to find individuals remaining at the fourth or fifth stage of spiritual development.
They may possess a self-identity that requires conformity and is highly
Introduction
conventional, adhering to the social scripts of their family or group
(fourth stage). For example, Iris Chase in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind
Assassin struggles to deal with family scripts decreeing that she act like
a “lady” and sacrifice herself for her family, as Earl Ingersoll explains
in chapter 4. Or an individual may reach stage five, where she can think
for herself and formulate her own moral standards. The fruits of this
stage free women to begin to question cultural scripts about aging.
Many of the characters in this study are engaged in this enterprise,
but none experiences it more self-consciously or painfully than Sarah
Durham in Doris Lessing’s love, again. Obsessively scrutinizing her
awakening to erotic desire, she watches, like an attendee at a play, her
fevered response to a young actor with whom she is erotically preoccupied, and she surveys her troubled dreams, which connect present
chaotic emotions with past, even infant needs. But Sarah’s particularly
troubled retrospective journey ultimately frees her to accept the next
stage on her spiritual journey, the detachment that leads to the integration of the mind and the body (see Virginia Tiger’s discussion in
chapter 1 of Sarah’s obsessional state).
Wilber’s sixth stage, which captures the new integrating potential
of the self, is particularly interesting for this volume. Able to hold
together the body and mind in one integrated awareness, the self for
the first time is no longer purely ego-based, hence Wilber’s characterization of this stage as the “centaur” self. Here the observing self can
stand apart from the mind and observe it as an object (Brief History
174). We watch the survivor in Lessing’s fictional memoir begin at this
stage, capable of surveying both her present thoughts and her past
behavior. Her self-conscious observation of her mind and feelings is
imaged in part through her watching various avatars of her younger
self, brought to life via the stages that her ward, Emily, rapidly passes
through, while her ability to conjure up buried, unconscious feeling is
captured by “looking through” the wall of her apartment (see chapter
2). The survivor’s growing ability to accept both past selves and past
evolutionary stages of civilization brings to the fore the profound new
acceptance of self and others that can characterize this stage. Wilber
calls it a break through—an ability “for the first time” to “vividly
grasp the entire spectrum of interior development” (Wilber, Integral
Psychology 51, emphasis in original).3 Here the observing self no longer thinks that the stage it has reached is superior to all the others.
Rather, it is capable of appreciating the value and need for all the various stages of self-development. This profound new acceptance, of self
Introduction
and others, helps elucidate the sense of inclusiveness that characterizes
many of the women adventurers examined in the present volume. It
enriches Sharon Wilson’s discussion of the mythic figure of Medusa
in chapter 3, the symbol of the older woman’s acceptance of formerly
frightening or monstrous aspects of herself, which she now embraces
as the source of her creativity and strength. We see an example of this
new acceptance in that other mythic voyager, the narrator in Atwood’s
Morning in the Burned House, who voyages deep within to discover
the autonomy to continue to create in her later years, as Kathryn Van­
Spanckeren explains in chapter 6.
Furthermore, a desire for inclusiveness, an understanding that “each
level . . . is crucially important for the health of the overall spiral”
(Wilber, Integral Psychology 51), has helped guide my choice of the
diverse kinds of introspective women’s journeys at various stages on
the developmental spiral that compose this volume. The appreciation of
inclusiveness helps us honor the way in which the aboriginal woman
discussed by Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez in chapter 10 embraces her
ancestors and her culture while integrating a new spiritual tradition
into her life. Here we encounter a woman dwelling within the mythic
consciousness of Wilber’s third stage of spiritual development. Rather
than seeing her development only in individualistic terms, Angela Sidney experiences her life course in terms of the stories and myths of her
tribe. It is in the context of her storytelling that we most fully appreciate Sidney’s ability to integrate the different worlds of her mythic and
shamanistic tradition with her historical experience and her embrace
of first Anglicanism and later the Bahá’í Faith.
An attempt to honor the diversity of women’s spiritual struggles
also guided my inclusion of essays that examine the unique structural
shapes of the retrospective journeys of older women whose lives have
been damaged by physical and sexual abuse. It is not the disturbed
mother but her abused early midlife daughter who makes the retrospective journey that allows her to accept both her mother and herself
in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, as Sandra Singer explains
in chapter 9. An even more problematic self-acceptance is achieved
by elderly, seemingly demented Mala Ramchandin with the help of
Tyler, her nurse and coadventurer in Cereus Blooms at Night. Jeanie
Warnock, in chapter 11, explores the way in which Mala Ramchandin
finds an image of healing and wholeness in the mirror of her nurse
Tyler’s love and, further, how Tyler mirrors back wholeness to Mala
through his cocreation with her of her life narrative.
Introduction
What is particularly interesting for my purposes about Wilber’s
formulation of stages of self-evolution is that he extends them to
include transpersonal, postconventional realms, and he connects these
spiritual domains to the earlier modes of self-knowing and self-being.4
These transpersonal domains extend self-identity to embrace all the
cosmos and, beyond that, the realm of the divine. Wilber’s connection of these more mystical, transpersonal realms to the earlier, more
psyche-bound domains of self-identity allows us to understand the
wide variety of searches and journeys undertaken by the various protagonists and heroines that this volume examines as all part of one
evolving movement of consciousness from matter toward spirit, at
whatever stage or phase individuals find themselves. An acknowledgment of the transpersonal throws light on the mystic experiences of
Doris Lessing’s midlife protagonist in Memoirs of a Survivor who
becomes capable of seeing the phenomenal world irradiated by the
face of God. Further, it gives insight into both the spiritual journey
of Lessing’s timeless male/female retrospective narrator, Johor, in the
first part of Shikasta and into the more limited retrospective diary of
teenaged Rachel in the second half. Finally, it allows us to understand
Lessing’s own spiritual coming of age in Shikasta, where she portrays
not only her own development but also that of all of humankind as a
journey along a spiritual spiral (see chapter 2).
My choice of envisioning the spiritual development of the midlife
and older woman in this volume as a dynamic spiral of consciousness—a movement back that facilitates the move forward, a revisiting
of the past enriched by the perspective of the present that leads to
a transformative future—is drawn in part from one particular map
of consciousness that Wilber presents, the work of spiral dynamics
developed by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, based on the work
of Clare Graves. Providing the striking image of individual and cultural growth as the movement along a developmental spiral, Beck and
Cowan posit that at each stage of growth individuals and societies
revisit earlier concerns and understandings from a more mature perspective, so that each self-world “transcends and includes its predecessors” (Wilber, Integral Psychology 47). Furthermore, Beck explains
that “the Spiral is messy, not symmetrical, with multiple admixtures
rather than pure types” (qtd. in ibid. 48). Thus the evolving individual
does not leave behind earlier phases of growth; rather, these continue
to be available as resources the individual can draw on and revisit. In
addition, different aspects of an individual’s makeup (identity, needs,
Introduction
moral stance) may develop at different rates and be at different levels
on the spiral.
These insights help us better understand the complex nature of the
retrospective journeys undertaken by various characters in the works
examined in this volume. The look back by a more developed self to
earlier modes of being and understanding allows the various female
characters in this volume to pick up the “dropped threads” of self
that were stranded at earlier levels of development.5 Sometimes the
maturing self carries forward earlier modes of feeling or thinking contained within rigid frames of obsession or neurosis that prevent further
development. The look back by more developed aspects of the psyche
can heal or free these damaged or imprisoned parts of the psyche and
include them in the more developed self’s ongoing growth. Debrah
Raschke and Sarah Appleton show how each of Atwood’s three protagonists in The Robber Bride revisits earlier modes of feeling and
behaving that were the traps set by previously undeveloped or stagnant
aspects of self (see chapter 5). More controversially, Sharon Wilson
argues that Iris Chase in Atwood’s The Blind Assassin learns to pick
up her dropped hand (“lying unmissed in Laura’s photograph”)—the
symbol of “her ability to express feelings openly”—and tell her story
(see chapter 3).
The complex structures of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
and Cereus Blooms at Night are both built around the special diffi­
culties of picking up the dropped threads of a childhood truncated
by physical and sexual abuse. In the case of Sidda Walker of Divine
Secrets, Sandra Singer shows how the novel’s structure imitates the
shifts in time and the activation of different levels of self that Sidda
experiences as she peruses the Ya-Ya Sisters’ scrapbook, which captures disturbing, not fully understood childhood memories (see chapter
9). For octogenarian Mala Ramchandin, the dropped threads of lost
aspects of the self are much more extreme. A victim of childhood
incest, Mala has dropped not only access to her inner world but also
the ability to relate to the outer world, as Jeanie Warnock explains in
chapter 11. At the beginning of Cereus, the terrified old woman has
spent almost all her adult life totally withdrawn from the human community, lost to language itself, and caught “in the endless repetition of
the moment when she was left alone to face her father’s violent rage”
(see chapter 11).
Wilber’s developmental schema provides the guiding images for
most of the chapters in this study, although only chapter 2 explicitly
Introduction
uses his work. The powerful structural image of retrospective spiritual
development provided by Wilber, applied to the culturally and individually diverse range of midlife and older women’s life journeys examined
in this collection, yields richly meaningful results. Responding to the
unique challenges of the individual retrospective narratives they examine, the various articles throw light on some of the most interesting
theories of aging. For example, a number of the essays in this volume
interrogate in some manner the trope of the older woman looking into
a mirror. Aging studies theorist Kathleen Woodward has compared this
search for identity with that of the infant in the Lacanian mirror stage,
as Roberta Rubenstein elucidates in chapter 7. Woodward explains
that whereas the infant, according to Lacan, discovers a physical unity
in the mirror that belies his or her psychic disorientation, for the older
person the mirror often plays the opposite role, revealing an inner unity
that belies their physical deterioration (Woodward, “Mirror” 68).
Several essays explore varied ways in which the mirror makes visible not just the continuity with an established self but also the image
of a self in gestation, a new self that is coming into being. This new
self neither denies the previous reality of the midlife or older woman
nor is limited to that reality but instead includes the previous “I” in
the more holistic self that is emerging. Thus, as in Wilber’s theoretical
model, the evolving self found in the mirror image of older women protagonists in a number of essays transcends but includes earlier senses
of self. Rubenstein explicitly interrogates the changing meanings of
self implied in the numerous mirror-gazing occasions that occupy Fay
Weldon’s protagonist in Rhode Island Blues, tracing Felicity’s development through the changing nature of her reflections. Rubenstein
captures the evolution in Felicity’s self-identity whereby she integrates
her past and present, developing a deeper sense of what Wilber calls
the centaur self.
For the three midlife women discussed by Virginia Tiger in chapter
1, mirrors are sources of self-knowledge and “the reclamation of psychic regions.” Sarah Durham in love, again by Doris Lessing, surveying
herself in the mirror at both the beginning and then the end of her year
of erotic obsession, finds in her changed image the means for evaluating the cost of her painfully acquired self-knowledge. Avey Johnson,
the protagonist of Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall, by
comparison, does not recognize the elegantly dressed stranger when
her gaze falls upon her mirrored image at the beginning of her inward
and outward journey. She must voyage into her personal and ancestral
Introduction
past to find the cultural reflection of the self not shown in the gilded
cruise-ship mirror, while Candida Wilton in Margaret Drabble’s The
Seven Sisters must look into the mirror of the Aeneid to find her way
home to a self willing to fully engage in life as she grows older. Tiger
ends her exploration of these three heroines’ encounters with mirrors
that reflect their spiritual journeys with a poem by a contemporary
American poet named Kathryn Levy called “The Middle Way,” which
directly addresses the problematic nature of the mirror sighting for the
woman entering midlife. Gazing into the mirror, the narrator sees
. . . nothing
but death stared back—the worst
kind of death
the kind that goes on
and on
I think most, if not all, the contributors to this volume will agree
that the cultural script that has made this vision so painfully familiar
for many women is now being rewritten by the works and characters
examined in this volume. If Rubenstein and Tiger directly address the
nature of the mirrored gaze in their essays, the mirror is implicitly
figured in a number of other essays. In my chapter I extend mirroring to the transpersonal realm, exploring how the luminous face in
Memoirs achieves in the transpersonal domain what the mother’s face
provides for the psychic development of the infant in the first stage of
life. D. W. Winnicott argues that the mother’s face provides the first
mirror for the infant, reflecting back the baby’s behavior and helping
the infant achieve a sense of autonomy and trust in the environment
(111). The luminous face, in contrast, reflects not the survivor’s outer
behavior but her innermost spiritual being, a potential that she slowly
moves toward acknowledging, until by the end of her memoirs, she is
able to not only encounter the luminous center of self but also see the
reflection of the divine face illuminating all aspects of reality (chapter
2). Again, the evolution in the mirrored image reveals the trajectory of
developing self-identity proposed by Wilber. In this case the Survivor
reaches the second of the three transpersonal stages mapped by Wilber,
the “subtle” or “deity mysticism” phase of the transpersonal (191).
Mirrors can prevent as well as assist new self-creation, as Raschke
and Appleton argue not only in relation to Zenia’s “bad girl” mirror-
Introduction
ings in The Robber Bride but also in the role that Laura, Iris’s “good”
sister, plays in The Blind Assassin, her confusing goodness increasing Iris’s ambivalence and limiting the emergence of her new selfunderstanding (chapter 5). Ingersoll, as well as Raschke and Appleton,
remark on the special mirroring of the writer’s desires that occurs at
the end of The Blind Assassin. Ingersoll notes that the nearness of
death gives special poignancy to Iris’s final dream—that her memoir
may be read by her granddaughter. Thus the aged writer Iris holds up
to us the writer’s longing for a reader, even if only one, to attain what
Ingersoll tellingly calls “the ‘atonement’ of art.” Perhaps Iris’s final
longing is also a mirror for Atwood’s own concern and that of many
of the women writers examined in this volume for a reader able to
respond to their protagonists’ emerging selves.
The retrospective journey explored in this study in which a female
character is led by inner or outer forces to examine earlier episodes and
aspects of her life bears much in common with what geriatric specialist
Robert N. Butler, “who coined the term ageism” (Waxman, Hearth to
the Open Road 30), has called a “life review.” He theorizes that it is “a
naturally occurring, universal mental process characterized by the progressive return to consciousness of past experiences, and, particularly,
the resurgence of unresolved conflicts” (Butler 66). Butler connects
this process to “the realization of approaching dissolution and death”
and believes that normally the “revived experiences and conflicts can
be surveyed and reintegrated” (ibid.). Butler goes on to state that “in
the course of the life review . . . hidden themes of great vintage may
emerge, changing the quality of a lifelong relationship. Revelations
of the past may forge a new intimacy, render a deceit honest; they
may sever peculiar bonds and free tongues” (ibid. 75). Butler’s “life
review” seems to be a particular instance of the dynamic of retrospective growth theorized about by Wilber and discussed above—impelled
by the approaching end to consciousness, the self is often motivated
to pick up the lost threads of unfinished psychic business or climb
to a higher vista of self-identity by which to survey the past. Butler’s
account of the effects of the life review almost perfectly describes the
dramatic revelations that emerge from Mala Ramchandin’s assisted
life review in Cereus Blooms at Night (see chapter 11) and from Iris
Chase’s complex retrospective account of her involvement in her sister’s death in The Blind Assassin (see chapters 3, 4, and 5).
While Butler connects the life review to an awareness of approaching death, it can, in fact, happen at almost any time of life after the
10
Introduction
self has developed enough to have an earlier stage to look back on, as
age theorist Margaret Gullette points out in Aged by Culture (149).
However, as the following essays will demonstrate, it is beginning in
midlife that the pattern of women’s retrospective spiritual journeying
most powerfully manifests itself. The midlife need to investigate life’s
meaning and purpose has been remarked on by a number of theorists
of human development, beginning with Carl Jung.6 As one Jungian
theorist writes, at midlife a “crisis threatens . . . [that] is at bottom a
spiritual crisis, the challenge to seek and to discover the meaning of
life” (Hart 99).
The search for meaning and wholeness at midlife is a human need,
but women’s midlife spiritual adventures seem to follow a unique
trajectory. Psychiatrist David Gutmann, who specializes in studying
men and women in later life, characterizes postmenopausal women as
achieving an “inner liberation” that manifests itself in new empowerment, autonomy, and willingness to take psychic risks (133–34). This
female midlife renaissance may be due in part to increased concentration of testosterone in their blood (ibid. 181–82), as well as to the
lessening of responsibilities in the home.7 Furthermore, Gutmann notes
that the “rebirth” of the “postparental” woman may be preceded “by
a period of extreme malaise” in early middle age (156, 157). In recent
years, this midlife female trajectory has been portrayed by women
writers with particular clarity and force, and half the essays in this volume explore the rich opportunities for women’s spiritual adventuring
of the new midlife narratives. These developmental stories of women
of a certain age often begin with the woman at midlife experiencing a
depression, unexplained malaise, or the falling apart of her world (see
examples of this pattern in chapters 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, and 9) as she must
face the loss of a familiar stage of self-identity and encounter the fear
and uncertainty that accompany the venture into unknown territory.
Further, she must defy still-powerful cultural scripts that celebrate
youth, beauty, and romance as the markers of women’s happiness
(the triad whose loss is acknowledged with agonizing pain by the
poem with which Tiger ends her essay). However, midlife and beyond
narratives of spiritual becoming need not deny the body. The midlife
or older woman need not become sexually “invisible,” as Kathleen
Woodward notes in the introduction to Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations (xiv). Erotic desire, still a problematic dimension of
aging, is considered by Rubenstein one of the last frontiers of feminism
(see “Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age”), and her essay in this
Introduction
11
collection on the fairy tale­–like romance of the octogenarian protagonist in Fay Weldon’s Rhode Island Blues encourages our appreciation
of an alternative to the usual cultural scripts on aging (see chapter 7).
In general, the conception of spiritual adventuring celebrated in
this volume honors what Wilber calls the immanent and the transcendent dimensions of spirit—its embrace of the natural world, relationships, community, and sensual fulfillment, as well as its aspirations
for eternal existence and closeness to the divine.8 While Wilber notes
that these conceptions of spirit are tied together in Plato, the West has
traditionally acknowledged the ascending motif of movement from
“the Many to the One . . . the Absolute . . . [the] Good,” while ignoring
Plato’s equal emphasis on the descending movement of spirit, whereby
“the One empties itself into all creation . . . [so] the entire manifest
world [is] seen as the . . . embodiment of the Good . . . and to be celebrated as such! The greater the diversity in the world, the greater the
spiritual Glory and Goodness” (Brief History 227–28). The spirituality
celebrated in works discussed in this collection embraces both otherworldly ascent of the spirit (see especially chapters 1, 2, and 3) and
this-worldly descent (found in a number of chapters). Both need to be
acknowledged and integrated to show the richness and breadth of the
river of spirit as it flows through human life.
Barbara Waxman’s study To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging helps us find the relationship between
the immanent and the transcendent figured in unexpected places. For
example, in Audre Lorde’s autobiography Waxman discovers the desire
to live intensely, to make the most of the moment, as a way to ward
off fears of death and deepen and stretch the experience of the present
(109). This desire may also be tied to powerful experiences of immanence in the embrace of the natural world or the celebration of the joys
of work and love.9 These themes reappear in the present collection.
We see a breadth of styles and modes of intense living portrayed in the
chapters that follow, from the zany attempt by the three protagonists
of Suzette Mayr’s The Widows to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel
(chapter 8) to Yukon Native Angela Sidney’s poignant desire to “live
[her] life like a story” (chapter 10).
In Florida Scott-Maxwell’s autobiography Waxman finds the desire
for intense daily living characterized as the ascent of the self to “a new
dimension of spiritual clarity” (Center of the Moment 170) that, in
turn, must be balanced with the descending need of the aging body to
submit to “natural limits” (Scott-Maxwell qtd. in ibid. 171). Several
12
Introduction
chapters in this present collection deal with midlife and older women
struggling to find this balance, sometimes in unlikely ways. Rubenstein
explores one of the most “delicately realized” attempts in the efforts of
eighty-three-year-old Felicity Moore of Rhode Island Blues to balance
late-life love, and its accompanying revelations, with the limitations of
her sagging octogenarian body (see chapter 7).
The essays in this volume cover works written by women writers in
the last three decades. The earliest work, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of
a Survivor, was published in 1974 when Lessing herself was fifty-five.
Interestingly enough, Margaret Gullette (writing in 1988) identifies
1975 as the year when culture “was giving its writers permission to
overthrow the traditional decline view that the middle years are a
time of devolution” (Safe xiii). While Gullette’s study reminds us of
the powerful effect of culture on the writer’s vision, Gullette herself
notes that great writers were creating midlife stories of progress before
the mid-1970s. I might add that Lessing, in particular, has more often
anticipated and shaped new cultural trends than been influenced by
them. We saw this in the 1960s with her feminist classic The Golden
Notebook (1962), which helped awaken a generation of women readers to the sound of adult women talking seriously about life, love,
and politics. Her more recent writing on midlife and older women’s
retrospective spiritual journeys continues to challenge contemporary
attitudes, especially those concerning aging and spirituality.
As we have already seen with reference to studies by Butler, Gutmann, Gullette, Rubenstein, Waxman, and Woodward, the new narratives of midlife and older women’s “journey to age”10 have generated
new critical responses by age theorists, psychologists, and literary critics; the present volume enters into a dialogue with earlier critical work.
Several studies have defined new genres or mapped out new areas of
interest that this present volume complements or supplements. In From
the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (1990), Barbara Waxman defines “the Reifungs­
roman, or novel of ripening,” a genre of female fiction that “rejects
negative cultural stereotypes of the old woman and aging, seeking to
change the society that created these stereotypes” (2). Of particular
interest to the present volume is Waxman’s description of the “internal
journey[s made by some protagonists] to their past through dreams
and frequent flashbacks [as] essential features of the Reifungsroman”
(17). The present volume develops this area in great depth.
Also highly relevant to this volume are the essays exploring the
creativity of the older writer and supplying new models of later-life
Introduction
13
fiction found in Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity
(1993), edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen. Foregrounding the unique expressions of creativity of the older writer,
Wyatt-Brown and Rossen’s collection adds to our appreciation of the
new models of self-imagining in the present volume. In particular,
Constance Rooke’s essay defining the Vollendungsroman, “the novel of
old age,” offers another helpful generic model (“Cheever’s Swan Song”
207). Besides defining the domain of the “universal” (the domain following death and preceding birth) as of special concern for the old
writer, Rooke also provides insight into the potency of the last work
and even the last pages written by the writer approaching death. These
concerns throw light on the last pages that Iris Chase writes in her
memoir in The Blind Assassin, as discussed in chapters 4 and 5 in this
collection. Rooke’s insights into the universal domain are also interesting in regard to the cosmology of Shikasta, as discussed in chapter 2.
The last two chapters of Christine Sizemore’s study Negotiating
Identities in Women’s Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary
British Novels (2002), which look at identity formation in women
of middle age and later, are also helpful to this collection.11 Sizemore
examines women novelists from different locations who tell stories
that reveal the “hybrid spaces between cultures where multicultural
differences can play against each other.” In comparing works with
similar themes from different cultures, she uses the “axis of age and
the specific psychological ‘tensions’ that often accompany various ages
in women’s lives” (7). The present volume continues Sizemore’s interest in the hybrid and developmental nature of identity formation. In
particular, Brill de Ramírez centers her discussion of the personal
and tribal stories of a Yukon Native elder in the context of “the catastrophic consequences of Euroamerican colonization,” particularly in
the Klondike gold rush era (chapter 10). Wilson’s examination of the
crone in chapter 3 also places works of Lessing, Atwood, and Keri
Hulme in a hybrid context, noting that all three writers “grew up in
colonized cultures” and are “explicitly or implicitly critical of both literal and secondary or metaphysical colonialism.” Warnock’s study of
Cereus Blooms at Night by Caribbean Canadian writer Shani Mootoo
begins by acknowledging the postcolonial emphasis in earlier studies
of the novel before addressing what she believes is its more central
concern with childhood sexual abuse (chapter 11).
More recently, Sally Chivers in From Old Woman to Older Women:
Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives (2003) includes contemporary film as well as narratives in her examination of cultural
14
Introduction
constructions of elderly women, “in order to devise new standards
and strategies for understanding late life” (x). Singer in chapter 9 also
notes the commingling of these genres, reminding us of the important
role played by film in the popularity of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood stories.
Pairing theoretical and literary works in creative ways, Chivers offers
refreshing new insights into such staples of old age as grandmotherhood, the nursing home, and elderly female friendships—institutions
important to several of the works discussed in this volume (see chapters 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, and 11). All these critical works help us devise “new
stories and readings of growing old” (Chivers xxvi).
More than half the chapters in this volume focus on the works of
Doris Lessing and Margaret Atwood because both of these writers
have, in recent years, explored with exceptional originality and depth
the retrospective spiritual journeys of women of a certain age. Lessing,
who at eighty-eight has produced a new novel (The Cleft), is a model
for the continuing creativity, experimental courage, and fidelity to her
own vision of the older woman writer. She has portrayed almost every
conceivable aspect of midlife and older women’s “journey to age.”
Lessing’s women embark on spiritual journeys that detour through
erotic obsession, depression, cultural marginalization, and nostalgia. In
most cases the movement forward is accompanied by a long look back
that allows them to revisit, reevaluate, and reintegrate the past into
their mature sense of self.
Atwood’s women “coming to age” are often, like Lessing’s, involved
in retrospective experiences of self-definition and reinterpreted selfother communing. More earthbound and involved with their often
problematic bodies than Lessing’s protagonists, Atwood’s older women
must fight their way out of densely realized social contexts that, like a
hydra, keep extending another tentacle when a previous one has been
lopped off. Atwood foregrounds this exterior realm of behavior and
place while mischievously interweaving cultural texts and contexts,
such as horror stories, comic books, pop stars, mythic figures, science
fiction, and quilts, seaming together the borders of the inner and outer,
the individual and collective. Various stimuli in the present motivate
the women’s spiral back—most often dialogues with those powerful
others, present or past, who shared or shaped the structuring of their
lives.
The last section of the book widens the examination of spiritual
adventuring by women protagonists to include works by other contemporary women writers, including postcolonial and aboriginal women.
Introduction
15
New structures and experimental techniques enter the book’s conversation, such as fantastic journeys by older women picara figures (chapter 8), elder fairy tales (chapter 7), the role of film and the Internet
(chapter 9), and the special shapes assumed by retrospective journeys
for victims of childhood abuse (chapters 9 and 11). As well, the unique
conflation of individual and cultural spiritual journeys in an aboriginal
woman’s tales is examined (chapter 10).
Part I of the book, “Doris Lessing: Spiraling the Waves of Detachment,” focuses on Lessing’s female protagonists in midlife or later
decades, often in combination with narratives of aging by other women
writers. In chapter 1 Virginia Tiger conveys the complexity and variety
of modes of midlife awakening in her exploration of not only the “interior” voyaging of “Sarah Durham, the sixty-five-year-old protagonist
of Lessing’s love, again,” but also that of “Avey Johnson, the sixtyfour-year-old protagonist of Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow,
and Candida Wilton, the fifty-something protagonist of Drabble’s The
Seven Sisters.” Tiger delineates three different kinds of spiritual journeys—the movement by love, again’s heroine “from erotic obsession
to detachment, Praisesong for the Widow’s heroine from complacency
to transcendence, and The Seven Sisters’ heroine from estrangement to
engagement.”
Lessing’s exploration of the relationship between individual and
collective spiritual becoming is investigated in my chapter titled “Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta.”
Drawing extensively upon the Sufi underpinnings of Lessing’s spiritual
vision, I trace Lessing’s movement from inner-space to outer-space
fiction, exploring Lessing’s mapping of her personal spiritual journey
in the autobiographical novel Memoirs of a Survivor and her universalization and extension of this process to humankind as a whole in
Shikasta. Extending the focus from the protagonist’s journey to that of
the author herself, I argue that Shikasta is the product of Lessing’s own
spiritual “coming to age.”
In “Through the ‘Wall’: Crone Journeys of Enlightenment and Creativity in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Keri Hulme,
and Other Women Writers,” Sharon Wilson views older women’s creativity through the looking glass of Medusa, “mother of all the gods,”
and, like Hecate, “the basis for crone figures in contemporary women
writers’ works.” While Medusa is sometimes hated and feared, Wilson
shows how Lessing in Memoirs and Marriages, Atwood in The Blind
Assassin, and Hulme in The Bone People use “their Medusa vision to
16
Introduction
discover creative possibilities within themselves.” Uncovering their reclamation of Medusa’s creative power, Wilson celebrates older women’s
journeys to new growth and their ability for the first time to gaze
on—and even embrace—shadowy, monstrous aspects of the self previously turned away from or denied. Exploring the journeys of a number
of midlife and older women in Atwood’s poetry and fiction (as well as
in the works of other women writers), Wilson moves us seamlessly to
the second part of the book.
Part II, “Margaret Atwood: Doubling Back Through the Labyrinth,” focuses on Atwood’s devious narrative mirrorings of women
adventurers in midlife and beyond. In “Margaret Atwood’s The Blind
Assassin as Spiritual Adventure,” Earl Ingersoll investigates not only
Iris’s potential involvement in a crime, the suicide of her sister—the
novel’s “whodunit” underpinning—but also Iris’s difficult, nuanced
“triumph of the spirit” in her “contaminated but ultimately heroic”
story. Ingersoll captures the novel’s tragicomic depiction of a physically and morally vulnerable narrator slowly and painfully creating her
version of the past, of the truth, of herself. She may not have the time
to finish her memoir, or, even more disturbing, she may not escape
the “contamination” to “ensnare [her] readers, including [herself], in
the ‘fiction,’ the ‘excusing yourself’ for the writer’s humanness.” Iris’s
understanding of truth has also been complicated by her training in
the feminine art of sacrifice. Ingersoll shows how not only are Iris and
Laura bred for sacrifice but also, it seems, so are the men who die in the
war. And finally, art itself demands sacrifice, as Iris acknowledges in
commenting that “in Paradise there are no stories, because there are no
journeys”—a comment that could apply to this volume as a whole.
Moving through the house of mirrors created by Atwood, we get
another look at Iris as well as the three protagonists of The Robber
Bride and their alter ego, Zenia, in Debrah Raschke and Sarah Appleton’s chapter, “‘And They Went to Bury Her’: Margaret Atwood’s
The Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride.” Noting the retrospective
nature of Atwood’s midlife and older women’s search for identity,
Raschke and Appleton argue that “the ultimate ‘answers’ are not
always positive or affirming.” In particular, in The Blind Assassin,
Iris’s journey is incomplete, her involvement in her sister’s death
never adequately acknowledged. In contrast, in The Robber Bride,
the three vulnerable protagonists complete the quest, confronting
the power tactics of Zenia and their own inadequacies that she mirrors through her stories. Raschke and Appleton also take the reader
Introduction
17
beyond the confines of the novel, relating Zenia’s ruthless manipulation to the power tactics of the two Gulf Wars. They read the text as
urging the reader, “imperative[ly],” “apocalytic[ally],” to “set boundaries on the exploitation of ‘raw’ power”—that is all we can do.
Kathryn VanSpanckeren traces a special kind of journey—that
of mythic female descent to the underworld—in her exploration of
the narrative voices in Atwood’s collection of poetry Morning in the
Burned House. Adopting Atwood’s own predilection for mythological
figures, VanSpanckeren images the five sections of the poem in terms
of Psyche’s performance of four tasks given her by Aphrodite in order
to find Eros, one of which was descent into the underworld. While no
one poem fully captures the collection’s thematic concerns with aging
and death (one section of the poem is a eulogy for Atwood’s father)
or describes the journey to the underworld, VanSpanckeren argues
that the poems as a whole “constitute this journey.” The “alchemical”
transformation undergone by the old woman speaker in the last section
leaves her with the power to dare to discover her own destiny in the
years that remain.
Part III, “Spiritual Adventuring by Other Contemporary Women
Writers,” examines the journeys of the spirit undertaken by older
women in a variety of circumstances and cultural contexts, including
essays on older protagonists in works by contemporary aboriginal
and postcolonial women writers. Eros and the aged body are fancifully brought together in Fay Weldon’s “genial” manipulation of “the
scripts for the aging” in Rhode Island Blues, according to Roberta
Rubenstein in chapter 7. Whereas Lessing presents a realistic look at
the miseries of elderly erotic obsession, Weldon celebrates the joy
and sense of new possibilities of Felicity Moore’s attraction at eightythree to William Johnson, eleven years her junior. As Rubenstein
points out, Felicity is a rare character in contemporary fiction “who
emphatically resists the cultural scripts of aging that assume erotic
and emotional diminution.” Rubenstein also notes the special role this
novel plays in Weldon’s oeuvre as it seems to constitute the author’s
own wishful thinking at seventy-three about possibilities for “women
who dare to challenge the conventional cultural scripts of aging.”
Another lively challenge to assumptions about aging, this time
directed at the association of older women and stasis, is provided by
Sally Chivers in chapter 8, “On the Road Again: Aritha Van Herk’s No
Fixed Address and Suzette Mayr’s The Widows.” Chivers holds up to
the older women’s experience the mirror not of symbolic travel back
18
Introduction
through the imagination but of outrageous, amusing road trips that
reconfigure how old age is constructed. Nowhere are cultural scripts
more amusingly challenged than in No Fixed Address: An Amorous
Journey and The Widows. Chivers finds highly unlikely female picaresque characters in Van Herk’s wandering protagonist drawn irresistibly into a passionate affair with an nonagenarian lover and Mayr’s
trio of older women friends headed back east to “take on Niagara
Falls.” These fantastic adventurers “manipulate the realist novel and
experiment with time and space” to open the way for new stories and
new imaginative possibilities for old age.
The older woman’s journey back into the past can be particularly
hazardous within the context of sexual or physical abuse, and the
works exploring these problematic life reviews often take on unique
narrative shapes. In Sandra Singer’s chapter 9, Rebecca Wells uses the
retrospective journey of the abused early midlife daughter to compassionately portray the physical and mental suffering of both mother and
daughter in Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and its predecessor,
Little Altars Everywhere. Perusing the scrapbook of her mother and
her mother’s friends, Sidda Walker journeys through suffering to healing and love, aided by the intervention of both her mother’s friends and
her mother, as Singer demonstrates. Singer also extends her examination beyond the confines of the two novels to encompass not only
the film version of the Ya-Ya novel but also the intense female friendships formed through involvement of readers in Ya-Ya chat rooms and
the regular online column by the author as other vehicles for reader
growth.
A different approach is taken to women’s retrospective journeys
in Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez’s “Surviving the Colonist Legacy of
the Klondike Gold Rush: A Native Woman Elder’s Liberatory and
Integrative Storytelling Turn.” In this look at the stories of an elder
aboriginal woman told to anthropologist Julie Cruikshank and reproduced in her book, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon
Native Elders, Brill de Ramírez offers us a fascinating example of an
aboriginal woman’s unique spiritual journey. Angela Sidney is able
to reconcile her earlier shamanistic and Anglican spiritual practices
with her late-life acceptance of the Bahá’í Faith through her ability
to weave together a number of diverse threads: historical experiences
with different manifestations of colonialism, Russian, American, and
Canadian; powerful storytelling traditions that stress the “moral and
ethical imperatives” of stories; and her ability to “interrelate . . . two
Introduction
19
prophecy narratives.” Her openness to the various traditions and spiritual practices she is exposed to and her refusal to fall into the divisiveness often associated with colonized “missionization” is what defines
her holistic spiritual and storytelling practice. In examining two of her
stories, one personal and the other tribal, Brill de Ramírez notes how
they both implicitly deal with the same difficult colonial experiences
of her people and her family. While hardships are recounted, there is
no rancor. Although her stories do focus on transformation, they are
not, as Brill de Ramírez points out in a personal e-mail communication to the editor of this volume, about Sidney’s own transformation.
“The focus is outward, offering potentially transforming stories for all
our sakes.” For this aboriginal woman, the individual and the collective are inextricably combined: “the focus is on all coming together in
unity” and “all becoming transformed through the sacred power of
love, community and the sacred.”
The last essay in this collection traces a particularly harrowing latelife journey from silence and insanity to human interaction and sharing.
In “‘Soul Murder’ and Rebirth: Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination in
Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night,” Jeanie Warnock thoughtfully explores the complex narrative structure of Cereus Blooms
at Night, particularly focusing on the intertwining between the firstperson outer-frame narrative, in which Tyler, the nurse of elderly, with­‑
drawn Mala Ramchandin, gradually wins Mala’s trust, and the inner
narrative of Tyler’s “imaginative re-creation” of Mala’s memories.
Drawn from Mala’s utterances and other sources, this inner narrative
is split into different time frames, replicating the way these coexist
within the present of Mala’s consciousness. Mala is enabled to undergo
a life review by proxy through Tyler’s loving ministrations that partly
heal the trauma of childhood and early adult sexual and physical
abuse by her father. Most interestingly, Warnock explains how Tyler’s
kindness to Mala in the present “reverberat[es] back into the past,”
helping change Mala’s understanding of earlier levels of herself. Here
the retrospective conarrative of Mala and Tyler not only transforms
the present consciousness of the voyager but also reshapes her memories of the past.
All three sections of the book provide richly suggestive encounters
with midlife and older women’s spiritual struggles. The works chosen
do not highlight the breakthrough to any one kind of being and knowing; rather, they celebrate many richly varied kinds of retrospective
journeys that midlife and older women take along the spiral of inner
20
Introduction
growth. Often their spiral-like journeys back through self-assessment
and self-discovery lead to new self-acceptance, sometimes even to a
new level of consciousness. Along the way, some women adventurers acquire greater levels of detachment from previously polarized or
limited modes of knowing and being and attain attachment to more
holistic and spiritually attuned senses of self and other; at times, they
become capable of witnessing the whole panorama of humankind’s
struggle to attain higher stages of integration and becoming. A few
dare to embrace the transpersonal on their way to being more fully
human.
The essays examining these works reveal the circumstantial richness, spiritual challenges, and inner integrity of each character’s journey, wherever it takes her. Each of the writers contributing to this
collection has likewise explored with integrity and thoughtful appreciation the various adventures undertaken by the midlife or beyond
women characters, responding with sensitivity and openness to the
difficulties and obstacles, as well as to the successes and breakthroughs
that confront the women characters on their journeys along the life
spiral. Over and over, we are privileged to discover not the decline into
age but the evolution of individuals throughout the life course.12 The
creative works and the essays that celebrate these evolving journeys
are adventures of the spirit possessing a symbolic force and cultural
resonance worthy of our deepest yearnings. These studies not only
enlarge our understanding of women’s “coming to age” but also bear
witness to literary experiences that are “potentially transformative aesthetic transaction[s] between reader and text” (Waxman, Center of the
Moment, 2–3). As the editor, I have benefited from reading the textual
encounters captured in these studies and, as a contributor, I have
gained from my own interaction with Lessing’s transpersonal spiritual
adventures.13 I am deeply grateful for both opportunities. I hope that
readers similarly will be enriched by their responses to these explorations of midlife and older women’s adventures of the spirit.
Notes
1.I have chosen to use Ken Wilber’s model of spiritual development for
its breadth and depth. Like James Fowler’s well-known study, Stages of Faith:
The Psychology for Human Development and the Quest for Meaning, Wilber
covers the first six stages of spiritual development. However, Wilber’s map of
consciousness continues with three more stages of transpersonal spiritual devel-
Introduction
21
opment. Furthermore, Wilber’s model of the development of consciousness is
much broader than just stages of faith. It maps the evolution of individual and
collective, subjective and objective consciousness. Within the domain of individual subjective consciousness, it encompasses the nine rungs of the ladder of
self-awareness, the corresponding examination of the climber at each rung, and,
finally, a look at the worldview of the self at each stage, including a different selfidentity, self-need, and moral sense. “This model of consciousness development
is based on the work of sixty or seventy theorists, East and West” (Brief History
132), of whom Fowler is only one.
2. Characterizing all of creation as consisting of an ever-expanding series
of concentric circles or spheres, Wilber describes each sphere as corresponding
to a “level . . . of being and knowing—ranging from matter to body to mind to
soul to spirit” (Integral Psychology 5).Wilber explains that within this “Great
Nest of Being,” each larger sphere “transcends but includes its juniors, so that
this is a conception of wholes within wholes” (5). Wilber identifies four quadrants associated with each sphere through all the waves of the Great Nest. These
quadrants represent both individual and collective development viewed from the
inside (subjectively) and the outside (objectively). For example, corresponding to
the five stages of matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit are five kinds of technological/economic development: “foraging, horticultural, agrarian, industrial, and informational” (Brief History 40). Thus, as Wilber summarizes, “The worldview is
the mind, the base is the body, of Spirit. These bodyminds evolve and bring forth
new worlds” (ibid. 58, emphasis in original). I am only examining the evolution
of self-identity.
3. Wilber draws this understanding from the work of Don Beck and Christopher Cowan, who, in Spiral Dynamics, characterize this breakthrough as “secondtier thinking” (qtd. in Wilber, Integral Psychology 48).
4. Following the first six basic stages, Wilber includes three more transpersonal realms, the “psychic” (“world soul”), the “subtle” (“deity mysticism”),
and the “causal”(“pure witnessing self”) (Brief History 183–205).
5. Sandra Singer uses this image in chapter 9. The phrase comes from the
title of a collection of short pieces by Canadian women writers.
6. Jung in “The Stages of Life” notes that “we cannot live the afternoon of
life according to the programme of life’s morning.” The second half of life must
be governed by the turn inward and the consideration of the meaning of “old
age, death, and eternity” (399).
7. Barbara Waxman, in her introduction to From the Hearth to the Open
Road, summarizes the findings of a number of critics examining women’s earlier developmental paths, including two landmark studies, The Reproduction of
Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender by psychologist Nancy
Chodorow; and In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development by sociologist Carol Gilligan. Waxman also discusses the study of the female Bildungsroman, The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by
literary critics Elizabeth Abel, Mariane Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland (Hearth
12–15). These studies emphasize the unique nature of women’s psychological,
social, and moral development and the unique patterns of the fictions that record
them.
8.In A Brief History of Everything Wilber describes the immanent, descend­
22
Introduction
ing nature of spirit, associated with the image of the goddess and with Agape, as
the embodiment of diversity, the senses, the body, sexuality and earth, the compassionate embrace of relationship and the many. In contrast, the transcendent,
ascending nature of spirit, associated with God, is connected to otherworldliness and to the “striv[ing] for the Good of the One in transcendental wisdom”
(232).
9. See especially Waxman’s discussion of the desire to live intensely and
the importance of work and love in the autobiographies of May Sarton, Audre
Lorde, and Donald Hall in chapters 2, 3, and 4 of To Live in the Center of the
Moment.
10. This phrase comes from a special issue of Doris Lessing Studies focusing
on older women in Lessing’s works, entitled “Coming to Age,” edited by Ruth
Saxton and Josna Rege.
11. Sizemore discusses Praisesong for the Widow in chapter 5 of Negotiating
Identities in Women’s Lives and Doris Lessing’s novel on the mutually creative
relationship between two women, one in midlife and one very elderly, The Diary
of a Good Neighbor (part of The Diaries of Jane Somers), in chapter 6.
12. Gullette argues for an understanding of age that counteracts the decline
narrative with an understanding of the evolution of identity throughout the life
course (Aged by Culture 194–95).
13. See Freedman, Frey, and Zauhar for a discussion of the need to bring the
self into one’s criticism.
Works Cited
Abel, Elizabeth, Mariane Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland, eds. The Voyage In:
Fictions of Female Development. Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1983.
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2000.
———. Morning in the Burned House. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995.
———. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.
Butler, Robert N. “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the
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Chivers, Sally. From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and
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Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender. Berkeley: U of California P, 1978.
Cruikshank, Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie
Ned. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders.
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Drabble, Margaret. The Seven Sisters. New York: Harcourt, 2002.
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Freedman, Diane P., Olivia Frey, and Frances Murphy Zauhar, eds. The Intimate
Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Introduction
23
Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.
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———. Safe at Last in the Middle Years: The Invention of the Midlife Progress
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Jung, Carl. “The Stages of Life.” The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche.
2nd ed. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. In vol. 8, The Collected Works of C. G. Jung,
387–403. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969.
Lessing, Doris. The Cleft. London: Fourth Estate, 2007.
———. The Diaries of Jane Somers. New York: Vintage, 1984.
———. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Bantam, 1973.
———. love, again. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
———. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. New York: Knopf,
1980.
———. Memoirs of a Survivor. Octagon Press, 1974. Reprint, New York: Knopf,
1975.
———. Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta. 1979. London: Panther Books (Granada),
1983.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1983.
Mayr, Suzette. The Widows. Edmonton, AB: NeWest, 1998.
Mootoo, Shani. Cereus Blooms at Night. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart,
1996.
Rege, Josna and Ruth Saxton, eds. Coming to Age. Special issue of Doris Lessing
Studies 24.1–2 (Summer/Fall 2004): 1–48.
Rooke, Constance. “Oh What a Paradise It Seems: John Cheever’s Swan Song.”
In Wyatt-Brown and Rossen, 204–25.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age.” Frontiers: A
Journal of Women’s Studies 22, no. 2 (2001): 1–19.
Sizemore, Christine Wick. Negotiating Identities in Women’s Lives: English
Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels. Westport, CT: Greenwood,
2002.
Van Herk, Aritha. No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey. 1986. Calgary, AB:
Red Deer Press, 1998.
Waxman, Barbara Frey. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of
Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood, 1990.
———. To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1997.
Weldon, Fay. Rhode Island Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2000.
24
Introduction
Wells, Rebecca. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. 1996. New York: Harper, 1997.
———. Little Altars Everywhere. 1992. New York: Harper, 2003.
Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.
———. Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.
Winnicott, D. W. “Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development.”
In Playing and Reality, 111–18. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Woodward, Kathleen. “The Mirror Stage of Old Age.” In Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions, 53–72. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.
———, ed. Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generation. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1999.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M., and Janice Rossen, eds. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993.
P art I
Doris Lessing
Spiraling the Waves of Detachment
C hapter 1
“Sleepers Wake”
The Surfacing of Buried Grief in Doris Lessing’s
love, again, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong
for the Widow, and Margaret Drabble’s
The Seven Sisters
V irginia T iger
In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf observed back in 1929 that
there were too few stories about the quotidian lives of women. Seventyfive years later, one regrets the shortage of salient stories about older
women, fictional representations of that period in a woman’s life that
one now terms “midlife” (Gullette 77) rather than middle age. Yes,
we have Pat Barker’s Union Street and The Century’s Daughter; May
Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing and As We Are
Now; Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor and The Diaries of Jane
Somers; Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel; Barbara Pym’s Quartet
in Autumn; Penelope Friendly’s Moon Tiger; Margaret Drabble’s The
Peppered Moth and The Witch of Exmoor. But as the last two titles
demonstrate, the dominant narrative paradigms are either decline into
invisibility or—as in the case of the withering witch—eruption into
excessive visibility.
What I propose to explore in this essay is the fictional representation of unanticipated interior journeys undertaken by three middleaged matrons: Sarah Durham, the sixty-five-year-old protagonist of
Lessing’s love, again, Avey Johnson, the sixty-four-year-old protagonist
of Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Candida Wilton, the fiftysomething protagonist of Drabble’s The Seven Sisters. While all three
27
28
Part I: Doris Lessing
face the diminution of forthcoming old age alone—two having been
widowed and the third divorced—on the surface, the life circumstances
of these three women could not be more different. Handsome, sensible,
cool, collected, the two widows find themselves voyaging retrospectively—and eruptively—back to psychic landscapes buried, closed off,
neglected, forgotten. Having committed sins of omission rather than
commission, the third—now solitary in a small, shabby flat in a seedy
borough of London—comes to regret the passive disengagement that
marked her Suffolk life as conventional wife to a schoolmaster and
mother of three (now estranged) daughters.
All three voyage physically, geographically, psychologically, and—
in the case of Avey Johnson—spiritually. As she travels from London
to the south of France and back, love, again’s heroine will move from
erotic obsession to detachment, Praisesong for the Widow’s heroine
from complacency to transcendence, and The Seven Sisters’ heroine
from estrangement to engagement.
Their journeys are prompted in part by older mentors, each one
a female figure. For Sarah Durham it is the spell of Julie Vairon, the
long-dead writer and musician whose romantic story—three lovers
loved and lost, a child dead, a reclusive life ended by suicide—is the
source for a collaborative drama Durham and others create. Long
before the show is mounted, Sarah falls under Julie’s erotic bewitchment. “I’m sick, [Sarah] said to herself. ‘You’re sick.’ I’m sick with
love, that is all there is to it. How could such a thing have happened?
. . . I simply can’t wait to go back to my cool elderly self, all passion
spent . . . and she watched her reflection, which was that of a woman
in love, and not a dry old woman” (186–87). For Avey Johnson it is
a hallucinatory dream/memory of her Great-Aunt Cuney, resplendent
matriarch of Tatem, near Ibo Landing on one of the Gullah-speaking
Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina. Geographically isolated
from the United States, these Sea Islands sustained over the years
sturdy African cultural traditions carried originally by transported
slaves, the heritage that Great-Aunt Cuney will again kindle in the
middle-aged Avey. “Moreover, in instilling the story of the Ibos [who,
on their enforced arrival, took one long look and, understanding what
was to come, turned around and walked right back, over the water],
the old woman had entrusted [Avey, her young niece] with a mission
she couldn’t even name yet had felt duty-bound to fulfill. It had taken
her years to rid herself of the notion” (42). For Candida Wilton it is
the elderly Mrs. Jerrold, the sibylline Latin scholar who teaches the
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
29
Aeneid to the seven women of the novel’s title and accompanies them
on their trip, following the path of the mythical Aeneas from Carthage
to Naples to the temple of Hercules at Cumae, legendary home of the
oracular prophetess, the Sibyl. “Far south, on the far African shore, the
pale warm waves lap. Ruined temples, desert sands, dead languages,
foreign tongues. These [northern English] women,” observes the narrator, “keep faith with the past, they keep faith with myth and history”
(171).
If, at the opening of each novel, all three have found themselves
cast adrift, one comes to experience—and reexperience—that erotic
obsession and emotional longing invoked by the far too simple phrase
“falling in love,” while the other, her Caribbean cruise interrupted
by discordant dreams, physical malaise, and bizarre panic, unexpectedly agrees to an adventure, one that permits her to repossess the
African/Caribbean culture and her own African American history, too
long disavowed. When an unexpected inheritance suddenly broadens
her solitary path, the third comes to renounce her journal’s record of
monologic whine and complaint, exchanging that entropic surrender
for polyphonic and pleasurable participation in life and in friendship.
“It would be good to travel in the footsteps of Aeneas,” Candida
remarks as she plans the trip for her cohort of “sisters.” “He stepped
whole and unharmed out of the flames of Troy and abandoned the
dead . . . and went on his ruthless glittering way.” She concludes,
“there’s a ruthlessness about him that appeals. . . . He followed his
destiny” (135), a destiny that Candida will now come to be prepared
to seek for herself.
Both The Seven Sisters, a middle-aged female recasting of Aeneas,
and Praisesong for the Widow, a middle-aged female recasting of Odysseus, engage in a contemporary recasting of voyaging marked by three
stages of the exterior and interior journey: departure, initiation, and
return. In contrast, love, again’s Sarah Durham has a mythic model,
Dido, and while she will not be immolated on sword and flaming
pyre, the protagonist does descend into the underworld of inconsolable need, longing, and grief. As readers of love, again remember, the
sixty-five-year-old Sarah Durham has been widowed for years, her
grown children well past the need of her care, her mother remote and
undemanding; thus are the traditional scripts for female protagonists
set aside. So what script remains?
At the novel’s opening the calm, composed, cool-headed Sarah Durham comes to stop before a mirror, a common trope for interrogation
30
Part I: Doris Lessing
of decline: “She looked at a handsome apparently middle-aged woman
with a trim body. Her hair . . . was described as fair on her passport. . . .
Surely by now she ought to have at least the odd grey hair? . . . She
did not often look in the mirror: she was not anxious about her looks.
Why should she be? She was often thought twenty years younger than
her real age” (6). Her daily life revolving around a successful career
as writer/administrator for a London fringe theater, she has not been
intimate with any man since her husband’s death twenty years earlier; her feelings about this are as composed as her feelings about her
appearance: “She examined herself in the dim mirrors, switching on all
the lights. Not bad, she supposed. She looked a handsome middle-aged
matron. A hairdresser had improved her hair-do: a small smooth head
went well with clothes more expensive than anything she had bought
for years. At the theater, her colleagues commended her” (14). These
Green Parrot colleagues become interested in a recently rediscovered
feminist, Julie Vairon (a late nineteenth-century Martinique quadroon),
whose haunting music and coolly intelligent journals become the basis
for a play Durham writes to then be produced and performed. As
rehearsals get under way, the company falls under Julie’s erotic spell.
Stephen Ellington-Smith, a wealthy patron of the arts, confesses he
has been desperately in love with the long-dead woman. Sarah, who
is described as having reached “the heights of common sense . . . the
evenly lit unproblematical uplands where there are no surprises” (43),
allows herself to become obsessed by a twenty-eight-year-old narcissistic actor, playing one of Julie’s lovers. Following that assaultive coupe
de foudre, Sarah discovers that the forty-year-old actor playing another
of Julie’s lovers has fallen in love with her and that she is more deeply
in love with the thirty-five-year-old director of the play. For while
Death in Venice is one of a host of intertextual allusions—by my count
sixty-five—and an appropriate one for love, again’s meditation on old
age and romantic love, A Midsummer’s Night Dream best suggests
the atmosphere where the six other character actors and producers
become besotted with one another, including the actress playing Julie,
who falls in love with Stephen.
Readers smart most in the brine of Sarah’s anguish, however, into
which we are constantly submerged. Entering the state of desire the
older woman had thought solely the prerogative of younger ones,
over the ensuing year’s inspection of her past—“trying to shine light
into the dark places” (307)—Sarah Durham comes to recognize that
the state of emotional disarray one describes as being in love has its
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
31
generative source in early infancy: the adult state of anguish is not only
“what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its mother” but also
the baby’s “longing for something just out of its memory” (350). At
the end of her year’s ordeal, she remains celibate. “To fall in love is to
remember one is in exile and that is why the sufferer does not want to
be cured” (350), concludes Lessing’s purged narrator, having achieved
by way of psychic journey the impersonal detachment characteristic of
other Lessing wise women, like the person turning memory’s leaves in
Walking in the Shade, volume 2 of Lessing’s autobiography. As Phyllis
Sternberg Perrakis so succinctly summarizes: “In early old-age Sarah
finds, on the other side of the whirlpools of masochistic love and debilitating grief, the space of detached observation and with it the beginnings of access to another dimension of reality” (“Whirlpool and the
Fountain” 105).
That psychic voyage is abetted by the Julie Vairon tale, which
acts as the inverse template for the conclusion, but not closure, of a
contemporary tale about women released from the poison that is love
denied. Like the structure of The Golden Notebook with its embedded
notebooks, love, again interleaves entries from Julie’s journals, which
function as contrapuntal counterpoint to Sarah’s erotic raptures and
the negative excitement of romantic obsession. Julie’s spinning down
into her death in the river’s whirlpool is recast in Sarah’s descent,
deeper and deeper, into a psychic whirlpool, “passing the stages of my
age and youth, entering the whirlpool” (209). She observes that “forgotten selves . . . appear . . . like bubbles in boiling liquid” (209)
and concludes: “She was obviously dissolving into some kind of boiling soup, but presumably would reshape at some point” (212). No
female fatality, Sarah Durham is a survivor; she knows that in order to
ward off “the dangerous animal that might attack from an unexpected
place,” she must never “relax vigilance” (342). At the end of the novel,
readers revisit the very room we entered on the first page, whose inventory then amounted to a rehearsal of the protagonist’s sensibility, a sensibility that would have to undergo change, including the excavation
of hypocritical memory. Sarah’s discarding the room’s accumulated
mementos at the novel’s conclusion symbolically represents a stripping
away of false memories. Just as she has inspected herself before the mirror at the novel’s beginning, so at its ending she interrogates her image,
seeing a woman now—after merely twelve months—ten years older. To
be sure, the reader has been offered an epiphanic moment in a penultimate scene where, in a London park, a solitary Sarah watches a young
32
Part I: Doris Lessing
mother whose excoriating preference for her son and not the older
daughter “awakens the suppressed memory” (Bell 491) that Sarah, too,
had been rejected and unloved, her confident brother intensely much
preferred. Thus does this sleeper awake, knowing her unquenchable
craving for love had such an early—and benighted—source.
Not for nothing is the Lessing novel’s title hitched to a resonant
musical quotation, Marlene Dietrich’s lifelong signature song, with its
crystalline “Falling in love again, / Never wanted to . . .” As title, like
Sense and Sensibility or Briefing for a Descent into Hell, for example,
love, again announces a theme, just as Praisesong for the Widow’s
title declares that work’s intent. Important here is the novel’s cultural
context: among different African tribes, praisesongs were (and still are)
ceremonial and communal chants, traditional heroic poem-songs—
“both sacred and profane” (Reyes 185)—celebrating kings, warriors,
and gods in the vanquishing of enemies. Important for its adoption
by Marshall, the praisesong historically paid homage to an individual’s transformative transition, frequently marked as a movement from
departure through initiation and then transcendent return. In this context, Praisesong for the Widow is a tribute to the homecoming of a
woman who succeeds in making an “awesome physical and spiritual
odyssey,” as Abena Busia happily registers (199). As in love, again, crucial to the recovery of unacknowledged memories is the operation of
dreaming. But, in contrast to the path taken by Lessing’s heroine, the
psychic journey of Marshall’s heroine issues not in detachment but in
the achievement of attachment: the embracing of confraternal legacies.
For not only does Marshall’s widow come to address that widowhood,
she also undergoes a literal and figurative journey, whose final, hardachieved arrival amounts to spiritual enlightenment.
At the novel’s opening, the middle-aged Avey Johnson is silently,
surreptitiously preparing to disembark from the Bianca Pride, her luxurious Caribbean cruise ship, intending instead to fly from Grenada
back to her home in North White Plains, New York. For the three previous days, despite the companionship of her two female cruise-going
friends, she had been distressed by a disturbing dream. In the troubled
dream-waters, her Great-Aunt Cuney first beckoned her to come, then
fought physically to force her to return to Tatem Island. This is where
in the past Avey had spent summers as a girl engaged in ritualized
walks to Ibo Landing with her great-aunt. Discombobulated by the
fury of the dream, with the infuriated old woman raining blows, tearing her silk blouse, and yanking at her fur stole, the two brawling like
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
33
fishwives, like “proverbial niggers on a Saturday night” (45) before
her scandalized North White Plains neighbors, Avey senses a battle
has been joined. For in the dreamscape, she, Avey Johnson, is carefully
dressed to accompany the successful Jerome Johnson (for years Avey
has not called her husband Jay) at the annual reception given by her
husband’s Masonic Lodge. So disturbing still remains the dream that
Avey is unable to place the stylishly dressed matron—beige crepe de
Chine and pearls—reflected in the huge gilt-framed mirror in the Bianca
Pride’s dining room: “This wasn’t the first time it had happened. . . .
Shopping in her favorite department store, she would notice a black
woman of above average height with a full-figured yet compact body
coming toward her amid the floor-length mirrors. . . . And in the way
she always did, she would quickly note the stranger’s clothes. The wellcut suit . . . the muted colors. Everything in good taste and appropriate
to her age” (48). In what will be this novel’s reclamation of psychic
regions by way of the mirror trope—present in each of the four parts
structuring Praisesong’s narrative’s text—the protagonist interrogates
the image not for signs of corporeal decline but rather for personal and
cultural dispossession. The mirror’s stranger is what Avey has become to
herself, she—the novel insists—being representative of countless others
who have by determined ambition and harder work acquired material,
professional, and social ascendancy; succeeding so, they cease being in
possession of their own being and that of their fructifying culture. Jay
becomes Jerome Johnson, and the protagonist has stopped being Avatara (readers will learn later in the novel) to morph into Avey Johnson:
“poise,” “reserve,” “the look of acceptability.” “She would never be
sent to eat in the kitchen when the company came!—I am the darker
brother / They send me to eat in the kitchen / When company comes. . . .
—lines from the Langston Hughes poem Jay used to recite to her and
[their daughter] Sis on Sunday mornings in Halsey Street” (49). Those
were the early, intimate days in Brooklyn—before their ascendant move
to the valiantly named North White Plains.
So the dream’s battle is between what Jerome Johnson signifies and
that which Great-Aunt Cuney maps. It is the task of this novel’s middleaged widow to embark upon an unanticipated journey to resolve that
combat, permitting the mirror-stranger to become repossessed, a repossession involving new awareness: personal, communal, and spiritual.
For, of course, Avey Johnson does not take a flight home to White
Plains but instead will water-journey to what she will discover to have
always been her first cultural home.
34
Part I: Doris Lessing
Not permitted by this essay’s length is a detailed description of
each stage of Praisesong for the Widow’s depiction of renewal, with
its casting aside of false skins of self. Let me summarize: after leaving
the ship, Avey Johnson spends a disorienting night in a hotel, reviewing the draining thin of her marriage and the transformation of the
subtle Jay to the grim Jerome Johnson. “How much had they foolishly
handed over in exchange to the things they had gained,” she asks herself, remembering the Halsey Street’s “small rites [that] reached back
beyond her life and beyond Jay’s to join them to a vast unknown lineage that had made their being possible . . . had both protected them
and put them in possession of a kind of power” (137). The text at this
point is laced through with references to the weeping, odorous infant,
the opening of previously shut doors, as she brings to the surface longsuppressed memories (and not without narrative reason). Again the
mirror trope instructs as the novel’s heroine metaphorically fingers her
own name. “The names ‘Avey’ and ‘Avatara’ were those of someone
who was no longer present, and she had become Avey Johnson even
in her thoughts, a woman whose face, reflected in a . . . mirror, she
sometimes failed to recognize” (141), the now receptive woman has
begun to understand. “Avatara” was the name granted her by GreatAunt Cuney in memory of her own grandmother, witness those generations ago to the shackled Ibos’ return by water to their home in
Africa. Described as “a powerful myth of resistance” (Brondum 159),
it is a tale of “simple emphatic rejection of oppression: foreseeing their
fate in America upon landing in South Carolina, these chained slaves
are said to have turned and walked back to Africa” (Courser 108).
Grandmother Avatara passed the Ibo landing legend down through
Great-Aunt Cuney, and she, in turn, to her niece, Avey. And Avey will
come to reinhabit the many meanings of Avatara, during the course of
the next two remarkable days.
Before repossessing her Avatara naming, that is, clothing herself in
the mantle bequeathed her by her great-aunt, Avey must undergo several stages of purging, prompted first by a chance encounter with Lebert Joseph, an ageless, androgynous figure who, like the fabular Ibos,
is able to envision beyond the material. A wily trickster figure (Pollard
compares him to the Voodoo god Legba who “presents himself as an
old lame man” [289], while Busia notes that Legba is “the name given
in Ewe religious practice to the god of households and thresholds”
[204]), Lebert Joseph comes to guide the quester through the several
stages of rebirth. For Avey Johnson, these involve joining—as though
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
35
she herself has no will to refuse the bizarre undertaking—the Carriacou
Excursion. An annual event, it celebrates in song, dance, and ceremony
the “Old Parents” on a small island close to the coast of Grenada. In
a boat trip en route to the out-island, Avey becomes uncontrollably
sick, the liquefied waste spilling from mouth and anus—symbolically
marking the expulsion of the past three, indeed false, decades of her
life. For those ascendant decades were filled with, metaphorically as
well as physically, overly rich, indigestible foodstuffs.
On the island, Lebert’s daughter, Rosalie Parvay, ministers to the
stricken stranger. Described as singing in half-spoken, half-sung words,
Rosalie coaxes the older woman through shame and disgrace. “A baby
that had soiled itself!” (217), as Avey admonishes herself. Female hands
massage the widow, just as that widow had once stroked her babies,
in her full flush of youth and expectation. Rosalie “was lightly kneading the flesh across her shoulders and down her back. . . . And when
she turned to the limbs . . . she not only oiled and kneaded them . . .
but proceeded to stretch them by repeatedly running her hands down
from a shoulder to a wrist . . . gently yet firmly pulling and stretching
the limbs” (222). Avey Johnson finds herself remembering that back
on Halsey Street this was the way she had stretched the limbs of her
infants, preparing, strengthening, and shaping for the future their souls
as much as their bodies. As the forgotten memories reemerge under
Rosalie Parvay’s ministrations, a traumatic rebirth is enacted. The
dense episode invokes the process by which Avey comes to be born
anew, ready to take on meanings that transcend her own person and
that of her family, ready to realize the meaning of the mystery told her
by her Great-Aunt Cuney, ready to become an avatar of that mystery.
On Carriacou at nine the next morning, Avey Johnson joins in
the communal rituals of the excursion: rites like the dance of the Big
Drum, the lamentations of Beg Pardon, and the ennobling Praisesong,
each of which expresses (as she intuits) “the innermost chamber of
a collective heart” (245). The epiphanic moment of renewal for this
awakened sleeper is not a moment of isolation but rather a moment of
engagement with the ancestral collective past: “And for the first time
since she was a girl, she felt the threads, that myriad of shiny, silken,
brightly colored threads . . . which were thin to the point of invisibility
yet as strong as the ropes at Coney Island” (249).
At the novel’s conclusion, Avey Johnson reclaims her childhood
name and place—Avatara Williams of Tatem Island, South Carolina—
to become part of “a huge wide confraternity” (191) stretching from
36
Part I: Doris Lessing
Carriacou, over to Harlem and Brooklyn and back to ancestral Ibo
slaves, journeying by water back to Africa. Looking forward now, she
plans to sell the White Plains house and return to Tatem, there to have
her insistence answered that her grandchildren and many others come
for summers and, at least twice weekly, ritually troop to Ibo Landing,
there to tell again and again her great-aunt’s ordained story. As Avatara
remembers Great-Aunt Cuney remembering her grandmother Avatara,
she describes that grandmother enacting the ancestral wisdom in the
sentence “Her body she always usta say might be in Tatem but her
mind, her mind was long gone with the Ibos” (255).
Substantial commonalities in the depiction of middle-aged female
spiritual progress can be detected, sharing as each fiction does such
tropes for the reclamation of psychic regions as the mirror; the weeping, odorous infant; opening and shutting doors. In my mapping of
the journey in the final novel, Drabble’s The Seven Sisters, there is a
retracing of the uncertain steps of a woman negotiating the middle
years of life. As the novel opens, Candida Wilton—recently betrayed
by and divorced from her husband at the same time as she has chosen
to remain distant, indeed alienated, from her grown daughters—is
“immured in the middle ground between an outgrown past and an
uncertain future” (14). As a close friend observes of their shared state:
“We can’t pretend that we are young anymore. So what are we, after
all?” (206). This becomes the four-part narrative’s overarching interrogation, with Candida experiencing her “ghost self” as a past that
walks, then stalks, and a future that is lured to a canal bank, there in
search of an enigmatic “ghost orchid.” So rare that it emerges once in
every fifteen years, this remarkable flora, glimmering with ghostly pallor in the depths of beach woods, seems as much a “blossoming of my
ghostly self” as a “ghostly spirit in flower,” she surmises (124).
Solitary by choice, Candida has surprised family and friends by
leaving the yellow fields and large skies of the Suffolk countryside.
Perversely, perhaps, she has installed herself in a small flat off Ladbroke
Grove, a dark, dirty, menacing area under a grey gloomy London canopy. “Here I shall remake my body and my soul” (19), Candida notes
in her daily laptop journal as she records her stasis in the novel’s Part
One, “Her Diary.” In this section Drabble employs a device wherein
the first-person diary includes third-person (italicized) editorial sentence summaries/commentaries that introduce the day’s journal passages. “Nothing much happens to me now, nor ever will again. . . .
I cannot help but feel that there is something important about this
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
37
nothingness. It should represent a lack of hope, and yet I think that,
somewhere, hope may yet be with me. . . . If I immerse myself in [this
nothingness], perhaps it will turn into something terrible, into something transformed. I cast myself upon its waste of waters. It is not for
myself alone that I do this. I hope I may discover some more general
purpose as I write. I will have faith that something or someone is
waiting for me on the far side” (3). Immersion and being cast adrift,
a beckoning from “the far side” of the liminal “waste of waters”:
each valuable phrase figures forth the spiritual voyage to be embarked
upon by this heroine, should her initial “faith” in and “hope” about
unknown futurity be sustained. A way of incorporating herself in some
partial but mythic whole might perhaps be achieved, prompted as she
has been by midlife “adventurous despair” (44). Like Avey Johnson
and Sarah Durham, Candida Wilton will enter her own kind of whirlpool, one involving the questioning of fate’s curious threadings. “My
destiny,” she writes as she considers the future, “has no shape and no
direction” (60). Considering the past, she wonders whether she was
always a pariah, without knowing it: “Was this lofty [London] solitude
foreordained to be my destiny? A destiny stacked, laid, unalterably
dealt?” (71).
Up to this time, Candida has lived most of her life unreflectively,
accepting passively—even inertly—whatever has passed her way.
Now she must actively interrogate her past, even as her days revolve
around grocery shopping at the Eurogroceries Minimarket stocked
with “Microwave Meals for One” and PriceCutter with its dump bin
of food packets past their sell-by date (122), relentlessly writing in her
journal each morning and visiting her health club, a gleaming new edifice (“I thought of Dido and the building of the city of Carthage” [13])
that has risen over what was until recently an adult education center
where Candida had earlier taken a class on Virgil’s Aeneid. Nights are
given over to computer solitaire and retelling the sad story of her marriage, her ungrateful daughters, her old Suffolk friends: “I allowed two
women to befriend me. . . . They co-opted me, and I failed to prevent
them from doing so. . . . I have always been a passive person” (18).
Nor would she seem about to make new friends, especially “with the
kind of person who would want to be friends with a person like me”
(51), as she censoriously describes herself in her diary entries. A review
of her marriage reveals the remote, sexually inaccessible, and unsupportive wife Candida now remembers herself to have been for many
of its last years. As dislocating as it is to live in the candor’s cold light
38
Part I: Doris Lessing
and as relieved as she now is that she does not have to live with her
sanctimonious husband for the rest of her life, she allows that “maybe
it is from my shortcomings that all these rank weeds grew” (49).
Then there is her unhealthy obsession with the Grand Union Canal
and her walks by the malodorous and plastic-littered waterway, across
from which in the great Victorian cemetery’s trees she sees clumps of
mistletoe hanging and imagines them, “suspended, like the Sibyl in her
wicker basket” (125). Giving all but omniscient voice to the novel’s
engagement with its mythic skeleton, the narrating diarist instructs:
“The mistletoe . . . is magical. . . . It takes its green blood from a strange
host. . . . It protects against witchcraft and the Evil Eye. It is green in
the cold midwinter. Its berries are yellow-white. . . . When its sap dries,
its dry leaves turn bright gold in death. The doves of Venus perched
upon the mistletoe. It is the Golden Bough that leads us safely to
the Underworld. These strange plants . . . are life and they are death”
(125).
“I neither live nor die,” she announces. Inhabiting neither life nor
death at the embarkation point of what will be a physical and spiritual
voyage—herself surely as inert as the Sibyl who (according to legend),
being immortal but subject to the withering of old age, was kept hidden in a cage suspended in the temple at Cumae where she uttered in
a hollow voice, “I wish to die”—Candida surveys her corporeal being.
“My skin is weathered, and wrinkles and crows feet don’t look as
good on a woman as they do on a man. . . . I droop and I sag” (15).
Slowly reassembling the truth of her past, she tries to find some talisman that will—like Proserpina’s beloved Golden Bough—bring the
voyager back from Dis’s dark door. For not so much gloss as deliberate
structure here in The Seven Sisters is book 6 of the Aeneid and that
mythopoeia with its hero’s (fearful yet hopeful) crossing to the Styx’s
further shore and descent into the underworld of the dead. As Candida
well remembers, Virgil has the Sibyl warn Aeneas as he prepares to
embark on his descent:
The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis’s door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven’s air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil. (Bk. 6, 11.187–90)
Set behind the mythic scrim of the Aeneid, The Seven Sisters interleaves other classical references, its valiant title alluding not just to
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
39
the Pleiades’ constellation of seven stars that Candida can see through
her flat’s window. (Myth has it that, on their death, seven sisters were
placed in the heavens by Atlas, their father, to form a constellation of
stars; its rising in May marks benevolent spring showers, while its setting in November provides the autumnal stars of seed time.)
Then there are the seven spiritual sisters in the Virgilian reading
group, whose classical names (Ida, Cynthia, Julia, Valeria) reassert
Drabble’s point that one lives in a palimpsest of epochs as well as
memories. “Italian Journey,” The Seven Sisters’ Part Two—with its
third-person omniscient narrator—has a borrowed title from Goethe’s
Italian Journey, where Goethe describes his perfumed walk along the
Vita Sacra toward the Sibyl’s cave, a walk that two centuries later the
heroine (187) of “Italian Journey” will follow. Here we learn of a
ferryboat named Arethusa, after the nymph who was changed into a
fountain; a Tunisian hotel named Diana, goddess of moon and hunt;
and—more curious still—the station stop and locality outside London
on the Stansted Airport Express line named (in actuality) Seven Sisters.
Early on, Candida mentions visiting this locality during her house
hunting, and in The Seven Sisters’ Part Three, “Ellen’s Version,” the
diarist muses on the Seven Sisters Road, wondering how it “got its
name” (255). (Indeed, it, too, has a palimpsestic provenance. Situated
on Page Green, Tottenham, the seven sisters were originally a circle of
seven elms that—in 1840—were said to be about five hundred years
old. These trees were replanted in 1886 by seven Hibbert sisters, and
then seven Lombardy poplars were planted in 1955 by the seven Bastian sisters. Legend and perhaps history hold that the site was an early
grove, its name, Page Green, deriving from Pagans Green. The locations of the seven trees denote a place where victims were burnt at the
stake.)
Candida taps out that she longs to visit Naples and the Phlegrean
Fields, the birdless realms of Avernus, and the dark pit of Acheron
before she dies: “I Campi Flegrei, the Burning Fields. Lugentes Campi,
the Mourning Plains. I love the Sixth Book of the Aeneid”(83). Recalling with a old chum from school days how once they studied together
the sublime passage where the Cumae Sibyl tells Aeneas he must pluck
the Golden Bough if he wishes to visit—then return from—the underworld, Candida reminds her friend that Aeneas was asking the prophetess about his destiny. Later she declares: “I would like to visit the
Sibyl at Cumae and hear my endless fate” (69). Fate is a word that
appears some fifteen times in the text, while destiny comes in second
40
Part I: Doris Lessing
at twelve, which is not without significance given that the protagonist
is seeking a destiny that hitherto has remained stubbornly hidden, a
destiny for which she may have been fated. Legendary Aeneas followed
his destiny. Can Candida? Or will she remain—as she puts it—“passive
victim of my fate” (149)?
Then the narrative begins to widen beyond the confines of Candida’s inspection of her past and interrogations about her future. Partly
it is her visit to Mrs. Jerrold, the ancient classical scholar from the
defunct Virgil reading group. Widow of some twenty years, her rich
and embroidered history nowhere so visible as in her Notting Hill
mews house filled with photographs, miniature landscapes, gilt and
silver and rosewood and ebony frames, cushions, books, and plump
chairs with deep hollows, this tough old bird is The Seven Sisters’
Cumae Sibyl disguised as a colorful macaw, a bardic gypsy, a seer who
can “see across to the further shore. Perhaps [muses Candida], if one
spends much time with the long dead, one can see them clearly” (110).
The phrase “further shore” is another reiterative marker, as in The
Seven Sisters’ very last—and italicized, unpunctuated—line: “Stretch
forth your hand, I say, stretch forth your hand” (307). Interleaved here
as narrative conclusion is book 6 of the Aeneid where the dead huddle
at the river Styx’s edge: “They stood begging to be the first to make the
voyage over and they reached out their hands in longing for the further
shore” (Bk. 6, 2.313).
Not for nothing is Mrs. Jerrold depicted as once having been a
poet of melancholic cast whose published poems bore such pointed
titles as “Dido in the Underworld,” “The Birds That Perched upon
the Golden Bough,” and “She Stands on the Sea Shore and Foretells
Her Own Death” (104). Not for nothing is Mrs. Jerrold a seer who
can imagine “the pale sad Candida” walking “forlornly by the dark
canal with its scrubby weeds and its iridescent oils and its detergent
odours. She sees her walk past the cemetery, with its broken wall and
its cracked graves and its tilted funerary monuments. She sees her floating in the dank water, like Ophelia” (176). Prompted by this vision of
her friend’s death by drowning, Mrs. Jerrold offers Candida simple but
sage advice: “You can’t tell what the future will bring” and sends her
off with a cautionary audiotape, whose gnomic watery wailings seem
to Candida to be the “squeaking souls of the dead in the Underworld”
(104) or someone drowning in a canal.
True to her sibylline prediction of destiny, Mrs. Jerrold’s advice
proves prophetic. An unexpected inheritance permits Candida—with
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
41
her assembled sisters—to plan a voyage following Aeneas’s path from
the ruins of Carthage (where Aeneas abandoned Dido) to Naples and
Lake Avernus (where, Golden Bough plucked and in hand, Aeneas
entered the underworld) and then to the Sibyl’s cave. Exultant as she
begins to sail into a future hitherto hardly imaginable, Candida Wilton
exclaims, “It was clear that fate had long intended that I go to Naples,
Cumae and the Phlegrean Fields.” Yes, she reiterates, “My journey, like
that of Aeneas, was foreordained” (145).
At this stage in her spiritual journey, the heroine is described as
“dying into life” (188), a felicitous recasting of the Aeneid descent,
initiation, and ascent in book 6. Ardently active now, this once reactive
woman has escaped a dark destiny of death by water. Sitting before the
Sibyl’s cave, in the novel’s epiphanic rendering of renewal, the sleeper
awakes. Mica glitters; thyme, lavender, and juniper scent the air; bees
hover and butterflies move acquisitively amidst clambering purple and
yellow flowers; a lizard basks upon a fallen marble torso; the episode
resonates with richly conveyed synesthesia. Candida “feels both the
lightness and the weight of her own body in the sunshine. She is heavier
than she was in her youth and in her young womanhood and in her
middle age, and yet she is also lighter, for she feels herself to be nearer
to the dryness of the sun and to the purifying of the fire. The fluids are
drying out of her skin and her limbs and her entrails. She is turning into
a dry husk, a weightless vessel. She feels with a new pleasure the ageing
of her flesh” (246). All in all, the scene offers a benedictory requiem
for this heroine’s acceptance of the steadfast approach of old age and
therefore death. Anticipatory, drawn onward, stretching forth hands to
a far shore where she wonders who awaits her—“Is it her lover or her
God?” (247)—Candida Wilton accepts the wizened Sibyl’s whispered
advice. “I must learn to grow old before I die,” she concludes. “That,
I think, is what the Sibyl tried to say, on her blank tapes and her withered leaves” (281).
As resonantly as this benediction rings, it is but seeming resolution. For “Ellen’s Version,” Part Three of The Seven Sisters, rudely
rips the reader away from equipoise with its jarring, indeed haranguing, first line: “What you and I have read so far is the story that I
found on my mother’s laptop accounts, after her mysterious and unexpected death” (251). An apparent suicide, Candida drowned herself
in the Grand Union Canal, its lure—like that of the beckoning further
shore of death’s dark kingdom—being too great. Complicit with the
estranged daughter, the implied reader—the “you” of the first line of
42
Part I: Doris Lessing
Part Three—comes to discover that Candida has hardly been candid.
In both laptop accounts, “Her Diary” and “An Italian Journey,” there
are lies of omission and lies of commission, according to Ellen, who
is searching for clues to explain—then perhaps put to rest—her own
offended anger. At one point, she underscores how “cold and cavernous [was the] home life of the Wiltons” (258). Charging her mother
with being “an emasculating woman” (266), she insists that “it was
my mother’s frigidity that drove my father into the arms of other
women” (258). Then, there is the enraged castigation of Candida’s
maternal indifference. As Ellen expostulates, “There is no reference,
in my mother’s entire narrative, to what I actually do . . . nothing, not
a word, not a breath of interest in what I was working at” (258–59,
emphasis in original).
Enraged, resentful, verging on the vicious, Ellen accuses her mother’s accounts as being deeply unreliable, its “faux-naif tone” (265) as
being balefully irritating:
She knows more than she lets on. Or does she know? Either way . . .
something odd happens to her tone. Why would one lie in one’s
diary? (265)
Why, indeed? And then there is Part Three’s disorienting final paragraph. “According to Mrs. Jerrold, my mother never went to Cumae.
She never walked alone up the Via Sacra and heard the immemorial
bees. . . . None of them ever reached the Sibyl. Why should she invent
a trip to Cumae?” (271), writes Ellen.
Except that Ellen does not write. Part Four, “A Dying Fall,” shudders into view with its first sentence, where we learn that Candida is
both back in London and alive, having dressed herself in her daughter’s
borrowed voice. “I don’t think I’ve made a very good job of trying to
impersonate my own daughter or of trying to take my own life” (275),
she opines. The narrative here oscillates between first- and third-person narrators, with the now habitual third-person (italicized) short
editorial summaries preceding diary entries. That latter’s consistent
gesture should have alerted the reader to Drabble’s deliberate—if intrusive—intent. But the competing focalizations in the plural text that is
The Seven Sisters are no mere self-reflexive narrative gymnastic on
the author’s part. The protagonist is being represented as “trying to
escape the prison of her own voice” (264), an escape akin to her effort
to break away from being locked “in the same body, the same words,
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
43
the same syntax, the same habits, the same mannerisms, the same old
self” (275). And while Candida Wilton may harshly judge herself to
be “back in the same old story,” capable only of producing from her
gaping mouth—like the dead warriors in Virgil’s underworld—a tiny
cry, readers must judge otherwise. For we know that the protagonist
discovers what actually happened in her marriage, for example, and
the nature of her relation to her daughter by her very act of masquerading as Ellen and in this guise lambasting herself with flaws, foibles,
and lies.
In my view, the narrative strategy of The Seven Sisters, with its
formal practices of partial concealment, delayed disclosure, embedded
riddle, oblique clue, signifying gap, baffling crux, oscillating point of
view, and intertexual engagement, has as its intention the positioning
of the reader to follow innuendo, actively ferret out significance, and
so become implicated as participant. Candida Wilton’s effort is to
achieve self-knowledge and, if she does not so permit or grant this for
herself, the reader abstains from such a harsh critique. In my reading,
for example, Candida does not invent her visit to the Sibyl, nor the
wizened Sibyl’s whisperings. A clue (for me) here lies in Part Four being
titled “A Dying Fall.” The intertextual allusion to Twelfth Night’s sublime ode to music as the food of love is, in turn, connected to Berlioz’s
opera The Trojans, whose broadcast solitary Candida listens to at the
novel’s end. Transported by the overpowering joy of its triumphant
presentation of the fall of Troy, she is filled with expectation. “Can
the chorus be singing so gloriously about impending death?” (301),
she wonders while sensing that she is being called to. By what? To
where? And The Seven Sisters’ very last line offers its other benedictory
requiem, an open-ended one, for no period follows the last word.
Stretch forth your hand, I say, stretch forth your hand (307, emphasis
in original)
Nevertheless, like love, again’s Sarah Durham and Praisesong for
the Widow’s Avey Johnson before her, this now-voyaged heroine will
reenter the demanding quotidian world, assuming the responsibilities
of family and friends. Like the newly reborn Avatara Johnson, Candida
Wilton trusts she will “keep faith with the past . . . with myth and
history” (171), as Drabble’s heroine puts it. And like Sarah Durham,
she may soon look in a mirror and begin to see “the slow cautious
look of the elderly” (349)—in the words of Lessing’s heroine. Candida
Part I: Doris Lessing
44
Wilton will also know that she has achieved that state of “a multiple
polyphonic” (172) personhood. Here she shares—with Sarah and with
Avey—what Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis in her introduction to this collection delineates as the older woman’s “new, more capacious sense of
self . . . [with its] acceptance of modes of self-knowing or being not
possible before.”
Perhaps readers of these three novels may move some distance
from the lament, traditional in its enquiry of beauty’s loss, that this
concluding poem pulls—like flint to magnet—so painfully forward.
The contemporary American poet Kathryn Levy titled the poem that
follows—as it turns out serendipitously, for the purposes of my essay—
“The Middle Way.” While it is this essay’s effort to subvert such terrors, one must review the poem’s insistent enquiry, one that I have
argued each protagonist in the three examined novels confronted and
transcended:
It has happened she said
staring at the mirror—but still
couldn’t believe it
so she walked outside
where a young man pressed
a body to his
and never looked up So it must
have happened she said
trying to believe
Please—tell me it hasn’t
she tugged at the arm
of her sleeping husband
he didn’t wake up
perhaps he was dead—had been
dead for decades
and never told her
—but she couldn’t believe it
something would change
Chapter 1: “Sleepers Wake”
45
she would sprawl on the grass
with any one—a lover a husband some
brand new self
and the tiny purple
flowers would erupt—the un
believable flowers
of a second of spring
she would stop and lean
over those bodies caught
up in their beauty
—instead of returning
in a trance to the mirror
where nothing
but death stared back—the worst
kind of death
the kind that goes on
and on
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility. Ed. Edward Copeland. New York: Cambridge UP, 2006.
Barker, Pat. The Century’s Daughter. London: Virago, 1986.
———. Union Street. London: Virago, 1982.
Bell, Millicent. “Possessed by Love.” Partisan Review 64, no. 3 (1995): 486–92.
Brondum, Lene. “‘The Persistence of Tradition’: The Retelling of Sea Island
Culture in Works by Julie Dash, Gloria Naylor, and Paule Marshall.” In
Black Imagination and the Middle Passage, ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis
Gates, and Carl Pedersen, 153–63. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.
Busia, Abena P.A. “‘What Is Your Nation?’ Reconstructing Africa and Her Diaspora Through Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow.” In Changing
Our Own Words, ed. Cheryl A. Wall, 196–240. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1989.
Courser, G. Thomas. “Oppression and Repression: Personal and Collective
Memory in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow and Leslie Marmon
Silko’s Ceremony.” In Memory and Cultural Politics, ed. Amritjit Singh,
46
Part I: Doris Lessing
Commas Skerrett, and Robert E. Hogan, 106–20. Boston: Northeastern UP,
1996.
Drabble, Margaret. The Peppered Moth. London: Viking, 2000.
———. The Seven Sisters. New York: Harcourt, 2002.
———. The Witch of Exmoor. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Italian Journey. Trans. W. D. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer. London: Viking Penguin, 1992.
Gullette, Margaret. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of
Midlife. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1968.
Lessing, Doris. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Knopf, 1971.
———. The Diaries of Jane Somers. New York: Viking, 1984.
———. The Golden Notebook. 1962. New York: Bantam, 1973.
———. love, again. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.
———. Memoirs of a Survivor. Octagon Press, 1974. Reprint, New York: Knopf,
1975.
———. Walking in the Shade. Volume 2 of My Autobiography, 1949–1962.
New York: HarperCollins, 1997.
Levy, Kathryn. “The Middle Way.” 2005, forthcoming.
Lively, Penelope. Moon Tiger. London: Penguin, 1988.
Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Vintage,
1963.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Plume, 1983.
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. “The Whirlpool and the Fountain: Inner Growth
and love, again.” In Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing, ed.
Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, 83–108. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
Pollard, Velma. “Cultural Connections in Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the
Widow.” World Literature Written in English 25 (1971): 285–98.
Pym, Barbara. Quartet in Autumn. London, 1977.
Reyes, Angelita. “Politics and Metaphors of Materialism in Paule Marshall’s
Praisesong for the Widow and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby.” In Politics and
the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature, ed. Adam J.
Sorkin, 179–205. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green U Popular P, 1989.
Sarton, May. As We Are Now. New York: Norton, 1973.
———. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1974.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York: Norton, 1997.
———. Twelfth Night, or What You Will. In Greenblatt et al., 1768–1821.
Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Vintage, 1981.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1929. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1957.
C hapter 2
Navigating the Spiritual Cycle in Memoirs of a Survivor and Shikasta
P hyllis S ternberg P errakis
As she reached her midlife and later years, Doris Lessing recorded
the adventures of her spirit in both fictional and nonfictional works.
While her two volumes of conventional autobiography are filled with
useful accounts and insights into her life course, her fiction provides
an even more powerful resource, particularly for her midlife and later
years. Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Shikasta (1979), written in
her mid-fifties and her sixtieth year, respectively, reveal a great leap
in her spiritual evolution. The first book, an autobiographical novel,
maps her personal spiritual transformation, while the second, perhaps
her most complex and wide-ranging work, is a monument to her
achieved spiritual vision. In Shikasta she universalizes her own spiritual journey and extends it to all humankind. In both books she uses
the structure of a narrator’s retrospective look at her/his spiritual journey. Lessing’s dramatic change in narrative style between Memoirs and
Shikasta—her move from inner-space to outer-space fiction1—offers us
a fascinating example of midlife creativity.2 Lessing herself describes
how “as I wrote [Shikasta], I was invaded with ideas for other books,
other stories, and the exhilaration that comes from being set free into
a larger scope, with more capacious possibilities and themes” (“Some
Remarks” ix).
I will argue below that in Shikasta Lessing finds her mature spiritual
voice and vision. Part of the style change that characterizes Lessing’s
innovation in Shikasta concerns its large scope. Memoirs and Shikasta
I wish to thank my colleague Jeanie Warnock for carefully reading an earlier version
of this chapter and offering helpful suggestions for its revision.
47
48
Part I: Doris Lessing
employ spatial metaphors on totally different scales. In Memoirs Lessing uses the metaphor of the house to convey the different modes and
potentials of individual consciousness. In the outer-space fiction of
Shikasta, Lessing uses the spatial metaphor of other worlds (literally,
other planets and star systems) to portray beings with different levels
of spiritual development. Both the individual and collective spiritual
journeys, however, are presented through the retrospective reflection of
mature narrators and their interaction with younger counterparts. This
essay will examine both the growth in retrospective insight achieved
by characters within each novel and the development of Lessing’s own
creative artistry—the maturing of her spiritual vision—that emerges in
its full power in the latter novel.
In both Memoirs and Shikasta Lessing reveals the fruits of her own
retrospective examination of her life as well as her long study of the
means by which the individual becomes attuned to her inner spiritual
potential and then lives out that attunement in relationship to others
and to the divine.3 Since Lessing is a self-acknowledged Sufi and has
also written about her experience of Jungian analysis, I will use both
Sufi and Jungian doctrines to help explain her vision.4 Furthermore,
since the earliest formal Sufi orders began in Persia (Galin 197–98), I
will also enrich the insights drawn from Sufi doctrine with commentaries and expansions on them by Bahá’u’lláh, the Persian-born prophetfounder of the Bahá’í Faith.5
Memoirs of a Survivor:
Lessing’s Spiritual Autobiography
Although Lessing called Memoirs of a Survivor “an attempt at autobiography,” this comment was originally ignored by critics because
Lessing camouflages the story of her spiritual transformation under the
guise of fiction and fantasy. Roberta Rubenstein is one of the exceptions, and in her groundbreaking The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing (1979) she characterizes Memoirs as “a kind of artistic history of
the development of consciousness in her [Lessing’s] characters as well
as in their creator” (220). Lessing herself provides the best gloss for
Memoirs in Under My Skin, volume 1 of her more recent, conventional
autobiography. She comments that Memoirs is about a middle-aged
person observing a young self grow up. She ties the waves of violence
that sweep by in the form of “gangs of young and anarchic people”
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
49
to the “general worsening of conditions . . . [that] has happened in
[her] lifetime.” Furthermore, she notes that the rooms behind the wall
grew out of the idea of writing a kind of “dream autobiography.”
Behind the wall “two different kinds of memory were being played,
like serial dreams.” On the one hand, she mentions the general, communal dreams, “shared by many, like the house you know well, but
then find in it empty rooms, or whole floors, or even other houses you
did not know were there, or the dream of gardens beneath gardens, or
the visits to landscapes never known in life.” These communal dreams
suggest those unknown aspects of the psyche that contain the collective experiences that have shaped and conditioned cultural values and
attitudes. On the other hand, Lessing writes of “personal memories,
personal dreams” using “the nursery in Teheran, and the characters of
my parents, both exaggerated and enlarged, because this is appropriate
for the world of dreams” (Under My Skin 29). Here we seem to be in
the domain of what Jung called the personal unconscious where archetypal images like the Mother and the Father are clothed with individual
experiences and emotions (Young-Eisendrath and Dawson 320).
Perhaps the key symbol that Lessing uses in her dream memoir,
however, is that of a luminous face, both familiar and strange, first
briefly sighted or sensed on the Survivor’s second visit to the communal
rooms behind the wall. Associating the face less with a vision than with
a feeling of “sweetness . . . a welcome, a reassurance,” the Survivor
recognizes that “this was the rightful inhabitant of the rooms behind
the wall. . . . The exiled inhabitant” (14, emphasis in original). The first
sighting of this figure represents a brief intimation of inner depths and
capacities not previously imagined or realized by the Survivor. This
symbolic call from the spiritual heart deep within initiates the psychospiritual journey of Lessing’s alter ego, the Survivor, toward attune­
ment with an unknown dimension of the self. Her growing sensitivity
to the unseen presence of this figure in her forays into the unconscious
realm delineates the stages and seasons of her inner growth. Along the
way she must wrestle with the demons she encounters—both personal
and collective—until, having brought light into these dark regions, she
is able to accept and honor personal shadows and relinquish outmoded
collective understandings. Slowly transformed by the new psychic
energy and potential she releases, increasingly attracted to intimations
of the luminous face conveyed in highly charged symbolic scenes, the
Survivor’s spiritual understanding grows until she is prepared at last to
recognize and attune herself to the inner potential that has been there
50
Part I: Doris Lessing
from the beginning, waiting to be recognized, and to follow the figure
who is both inner guide and transpersonal symbol, both within the
Survivor and beyond her.
For the Survivor to access the inner potential symbolized by the
luminous face, she must, according to a Sufi saying, die before she
dies—meaning she must die to the ego in order to open herself up to
the real center of her psyche, which is her inner self or soul that connects her with the transcendental (Vaughan-Lee 94). The ego here is
associated with what Sufi psychologist Robert Frager calls the tyrannical self, the self dominated by “egotistic impulses that are often
deeply unconscious” (3). While, for many contemporary thinkers and
psychologists, this ego is the normal center of the conscious self, for
the Sufis this psychological level of self, consisting of one’s desires and
emotions, is only the first and most limited level of self, completely out
of touch with one’s inner potential and the creative powers at work
in the universe (ibid.). One psychologist who does theorize about a
deeper level of self is Carl Jung, who identified an inner dimension
of the psyche called the “Self,” which he characterized as the center
and governor of the psyche, “a psychic totality and at the same time a
centre, neither of which coincides with the ego but includes it, just as
a larger circle encloses a smaller one” (142). According to The Cambridge Companion to Jung, the Self is “experienced as a transpersonal
power which invests life with meaning . . . towards which the individual is unconsciously striving” (Young-Eisendrath and Dawson 318).
Jung names the process whereby the individual becomes attuned to the
Self as that of individuation.6 Elsewhere, I comment that “because this
new center [the Jungian Self] is not accessible to the ego it can feel like
an alien being. Thus the ‘self’ is sometimes personalized as a separate
being or force” (“Sufism” 106). Thus from a Jungian perspective, the
Survivor’s encounter with the luminous face may be thought of as an
encounter with the Jungian Self.
However, this is only the beginning of our understanding of the
significance of the luminous face. In the literature of the Sufis we get
a much fuller discussion of the capacities of the inner world (Frager
108), and a brief investigation of this tradition will enrich our understanding of both the Survivor’s spiritual journey and the significance
of the luminous face. Frager, for example, speaks of the potentialities for developing the conscious self far beyond the tyrannical self
emphasized in contemporary thinking and lists seven “different levels
of development . . . founded on references in the Koran” (49). To
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51
discuss the process whereby the self becomes increasingly at one with
its inner spiritual potential and accesses some of these deeper levels
of being, I will use the term “detachment.” I use this term because it
is used in Sufi and other spiritual traditions to characterize the freeing of the individual from distracting obstacles or claims of the lower
self so as to allow the person to realize his or her spiritual potential.
Focusing on the place of the will (or motivation) and of the heart (the
metaphorical seat of the attraction of the self to intimations of the
divine) in this process, I will examine the interface between the will,
the heart, and the mind (or understanding) in the Survivor’s spiritual
journey.7 In the spatial metaphor that Lessing uses, the Survivor will
develop her spiritual capacities through her experiences on both sides
of the wall—through her conscious reliving of her memories of her past
behavior in her interaction with a younger version of herself (on the
realistic side of the wall) and through her access to unconscious personal and impersonal conditioning in the rooms behind the wall (the
symbolic side of the wall). As she purifies her heart, disciplines her will,
and strengthens her understanding, the Survivor encounters a series
of symbolic spaces behind the wall: the room she cleans and paints;
the six-sided meditative room in which she participates in archetypal
activity; the collapsing walls of the impersonal rooms through which
she observes new growth and senses the luminous face; and the multilayered gardens, a vision of which she brings with her to the conscious
world. These spaces—and her responses to them—are benchmarks on
the Survivor’s journey to new levels of inner growth, leading to her
encounter with the deepest level of inner being.
As I mentioned above, the Survivor’s initial motivation for beginning the difficult process of spiritual growth comes from her brief,
early sighting of the luminous face—an early intimation of unknown
possibilities within and without. The inner luminous face exerts on
the Survivor the kind of attraction that is consonant with the claim
suggested by Emanuel Levinas’s dictum regarding the face of the other.
The Survivor feels an attraction that is prior to consciousness and
intellectual thought. Levinas has written at length on the prior moral
claim of the other, which for him is embodied in the figure of the face
of the other. Lessing’s face suggests the prior moral claim of the deepest self and the divine spark within—for Levinas, the “movement that
sustains knowledge while remaining outside of knowledge is that of
the ethical situation” (Cohen 6). Lessing places that ethical situation
within a spiritual framework and investigates the claim of the spirit on
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human existence. Her novel suggests that what sustains being is the
movement toward recognition of, and attraction to, that which makes
being possible—its radiant, transcendent, inner divine spark, which is
neither wholly within nor wholly without. Thus, the luminous face is
an entity connected with being that is not limited to being but partakes
of something beyond being. Many religious traditions refer to this
entity as the soul, and the Sufis, according to Frager, delineate “seven
facets of the complete soul” (96).8 The last or innermost facet, “the
secret of secrets,” is the realm of the transcendent within the “heart
of the heart” (Frager 109, 110). The great Sufi philosopher Ibn ‘Arabi
has, at times, personified this facet and given it the name of Khidr,
“an archetypal symbol of our inner essence, and . . . also the guide
that reveals this secret” (Vaughan-Lee 15).9 For Ibn ‘Arabi this figure
represents the individual form that the encounter with the divine takes
for the individual (Corbin 61). “He [Khidr] is the ‘part allotted’ to each
Spiritual [being], his absolute individuality, the divine Name invested
in him” (ibid. 62–63). Interestingly enough, Jung, too, uses Khidr,
who is found in the eighteenth Sura of the Koran, as an example of
the personification of an unknown inner dimension, in Jung’s case the
Self, which feels alien to the ego (Jung 141).10 I will focus on the Sufi
understanding of this inner dimension, as I feel it offers the richest
interpretation of the Survivor’s inner experiences. Thus the luminous
face, like Khidr in the Sufi tradition, seems to be a personification of
a spiritual encounter. It allows the Survivor to witness her own divine
nature, to be attuned to the form that the divine spark takes within her
and thus to the transcendent otherness of the self.11 It is this dimension
of the self that comes from and connects one to the divine. Having an
encounter with this level of one’s being is perhaps what Mohammed is
suggesting when he declares, “He who knows himself knows his Lord”
(qtd. in Harvey 143).
Early writings of Bahá’u’lláh, which are infused with and often
interpret and clarify Sufi symbols, provide further insight into this
understanding of the deepest self. In The Book of Certitude Bahá’u’lláh
provides the preconditions for the spiritual search that allows the
individual seeker to gain knowledge of both God and his/her inner
being. Both detachment and attachment are necessary as the seeker
must “cleanse and purify his heart . . . from the obscuring dust of all
acquired knowledge. . . . He must purge his breast, which is the sanctuary of the abiding love of the Beloved, of every defilement, and sanctify
his soul from all that pertaineth to water and clay, from all shadowy
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
53
and ephemeral attachments” (192). Much of the search that Lessing
describes in Memoirs is the process whereby the Survivor’s heart is
so cleansed and purified that, in Bahá’u’lláh’s words, “no remnant
of either love or hate may linger therein, lest that love blindly incline
him to error, or that hate repel him away from the truth” (ibid.).
Although in this state the seeker is not trapped by “limiting, particularistic attachments” (Saiedi 142), the spiritual seeker is still not absolved
of concern for others but instead is required to respond to the plight of
other human beings as well as to “show kindness to animals” (Certitude 194).12
Much Sufi literature is also taken up with the need for the assistance of a spiritual guide, and classical Sufi mystics place their spiritual
journeys under the umbrella of Mohammed’s teachings.13 Although
Lessing has written in Walking in the Shade, volume 2 of her conventional autobiography, about her search for spiritual guidance and her
realization of the need for a teacher or guide, leading to her eventual
adoption of Idries Shah as her spiritual mentor (350–57), in Memoirs
Lessing does not portray the intermediary of a human guide or attunement to a prophetic figure. Rather, she portrays only an inner spiritual
guide (akin to Khidr) in the luminous face and captures the moment
of inspiration in which she first catches a glimpse of this guide and
thus of her own inner spiritual being. Thus the luminous face seems to
function both as the embodiment of the spiritual spark within her soul
and as an intimation of the station of purity of heart that will allow her
attunement to that spark. Although the Survivor’s early sighting of the
face suggests that she has a brief intimation early in her journey of her
inner spiritual being, she cannot sustain this vision until she has progressed along the path to detachment.14 In particular, the path to a sustainable vision of the Survivor’s deepest self must traverse the realms
of the Survivor’s individual and collective unconscious, especially those
areas of cultural conditioning and individual psychic formation that
have arrested her growth, causing psychic imbalance and spiritual
underdevelopment. In order “to cleanse and purify her heart,” the
Survivor must deal with all kinds of unfinished business, both personal
and collective. She must journey back into the past and deep within in
order to move forward. A powerful impetus for traversing that difficult
psychospiritual road occurs in the Survivor’s outer world when she is
presented with a unique opportunity to reexamine her earlier life.
Although the narrator’s first visit to her communal unconscious
world was spontaneous and unplanned, to investigate deeply this area
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of her psyche she needs a link between her ordinary life and the world
within that will facilitate her access to the realm of unconscious memories and dreams (see Vaughan-Lee 66–68). Such a link is provided
when the Survivor finds herself left to care for a young girl, Emily. Caring for Emily allows the Survivor to engage in a retrospective process
of reseeing and reunderstanding her earlier life in order to facilitate her
movement along the spiral of inner transformation; that is, to make
that journey inward the narrator must observe, care for, and above
all accept responsibility for her younger self. To aid the Survivor in
this task, a companion of Emily’s suddenly materializes, the animal
Hugo—an animal shaped like a dog with the face of a cat. Yellow, with
a harsh and rough hide and a long, whiplike tail, Hugo is “an ugly
beast” (21); his outer ugliness is a reflection of the abuse of the physical
and natural in the Survivor’s world.15 Representing Emily’s bond with
the natural world, Hugo is threatened by the growing harshness and
violation of pavement life where food is increasingly in short supply
and the keeping of a pet is an unheard-of luxury. Furthermore, Hugo’s
suffering when Emily deserts him to spend her days on the pavement
suggests he also represents a deep bond with aspects of her instinctual
self that she is violating in her need for acceptance from her peer group.
Indeed, his powerful presence ties him to one of the symbols of the
Self described by Jung as “a helpful animal representing [the Self’s]
instinctual nature and our primal connectedness to our surroundings”
(Vaughan-Lee 181). As such, he seems to be an early form of inner
authority that grounds Emily and thus the Survivor in her spiral-like
journey back and up the spiritual path. Using Frager’s terminology,
Emily seems to feel a deep bond with her animal soul,16 which she
expresses through her loyalty to Hugo.
If Hugo’s role as inner witness of neglected aspects of Emily’s psyche
is to wait and mourn for Emily, the Survivor’s work as she waits and
watches with Hugo is that of the observer, learning to recognize and
understand the patterns of behavior that governed her younger self.
For example, when Emily chooses not to leave with the first youthful
gang, the Survivor understands that her younger self had been faithful
to her inner core, to the primary bond with Hugo. Here Lessing seems
to be giving a symbolic version of choices she made in her younger
life that she now understands and accepts as crucial to the person she
became.17 This understanding leads the Survivor to an archetypal vision
of another kind of room behind the wall, a six-sided meditative space
where people fit bits of cloth to a pattern of a Persian rug whose colors
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
55
come to life when the matching fits.18 This observation and discovery
of how the elements of everyday life fit into the larger archetypal patterns of existence, preeminently the work of the artist and the spiritual
seeker, is the Survivor’s present concern. She also understands that her
early refusal to be caught up in the trends of her day has safeguarded
her ability to participate in this ongoing psychic activity. Her greater
insight into and acceptance of her earlier choices is one of the signs of
her spiritual growth.
The Rooms Behind the Wall
While the Survivor’s outer life is spent observing Emily and the chaotic
pavement life, that is, communing with her conscious memory, in the
impersonal rooms behind the wall the Survivor discovers various kinds
of inner work that she must perform, leading to different forms of
detachment. As she cleans and prepares the walls of a drawing room
behind the wall and wipes off the old grime, she is symbolically stripping away the obstacles that have barred her from getting in touch with
her deeper self. The Survivor’s cultural conditioning is suggested by
rooms crammed with old furniture—none of it clean or in good repair
(24–25). Clearing out the outmoded ways of thinking and believing
suggested by the shabby furniture is the first step in the purification of
the Survivor’s inner being.19 This is also part of the process of cleansing
the heart from all remnants of either love or hate, the essence of learning detachment from culturally instilled limitations in order to access
one’s inner potential. But such psychic work cannot be done without
facing resistance from the power of what Jung calls the “shadow,”
those aspects of the personality that the “conscious ego does not recognize in him- or herself” (Young-Eisendrath and Dawson 319). Here
Lessing seems to portray the shadow of the collective rather than the
individual unconscious, embodying both the repression of aspects of
reality and the institutionalization of coercive patterns of thinking and
behaving.20 This collective shadow seems insidiously to undermine or
undo the work of bringing to consciousness the old patterns of thinking and believing that have held the Survivor and her culture in their
grip. Neatly ordered rooms, which were restored one moment earlier
from confusion, are the next moment reduced to chaos as if subjected
to “a poltergeist’s tricks” (63–64). On one level these violent changes
reflect the violent emotional volatility of Emily’s adolescent moods in
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the outer world, and, on another level, they force the Survivor to recognize the difficulty in changing deeply ingrained “coercive patterns”
(Shah, frontispiece of Walking in the Shade). In applying coat after
coat of fresh paint to the wall of the drawing room behind the wall,
the Survivor is preparing a clean, safe space in her inner world where
new psychic discovery is possible. Again Lessing’s spatial metaphor
allows her to characterize another mode of consciousness, the space of
emptiness and detachment, which is the necessary first condition for
the spiritual search (Bahá’u’lláh Certitude 192).
The impersonal rooms, however, are only one dimension of the
unconscious; the Survivor must also visit the personal realm behind the
wall, where again she must begin the work of cleansing the heart, in
this case of the traumas of her early life. Such traumas must be revisited and integrated into the psyche if the self-discovery and self-acceptance that leads to inner change is going to take place. Encountering
Emily’s father’s abusive tickling—“her [Emily’s] body was contorting
and twisting to escape the man’s great hands that squeezed and dug
into her ribs, to escape the great, cruel face that bent so close over her
with its look of private satisfaction” (87)21—and her mother’s failure
to meet her young daughter’s physical or emotional needs, the Survivor
must cope with Emily’s emotional deprivation, hunger for love and
acceptance, and overwhelming guilt—all of which become embodied
in the sound of a child crying. The Survivor, searching room after
room, never finds this child. However, as the Survivor brings to light
and consciousness the dark places in her own and Emily’s psyche, the
interior and exterior worlds become closer together. Hearing the sound
of a small child crying in both worlds, the Survivor is eventually able
to locate and succor one manifestation of this crying child, Emily’s
mother, and thus symbolically come to terms with her own early pain
through nurturing and forgiving her mother. When the Survivor picks
up the frantically crying, desperately needy mother-as-a-child, “[a]
pretty, fair little girl . . . at last find[s] comfort in my arms” (149).
The changes that the Survivor is undergoing allow her to be aware
of two opposing forces in her life, one deeply positive, the other seemingly destructive, as if she is straddling two worlds. This dialectic of
opposites is important in describing the spiritual journey.22 We first see
this tension explicitly described in the scene in the impersonal rooms
where the Survivor prepares a clean, safe place for her inner journey.
As she cleans and paints, she feels herself “in a continuing relation to
the invisible destructive creature, or force, just as I was with the other
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
57
beneficent presence” (65–66). Part of what the Survivor will learn on
her spiritual journey is to accept and work with the destructive element.
The Dialect of Detachment and Attachment
The dialect of opposites plays another kind of role in the constant
rhythm the Survivor experiences between gaining perspective on, and
detachment from, old attachments and feeling attraction to a new way
of becoming and being. This rhythm of detachment and attachment
can also be described as a “dialectic of negation and affirmation,”
which centers on “relinquishing self-love in order to become united
with the beloved” (Saiedi 102–3).23 This rhythm operates on the various levels of the Survivor’s experiences. For example, the gift for the
Survivor’s increasing detachment from the devolution of the old ways,
symbolically described as a nameless “it,” is her capacity to experience
a powerful alternative vision in the inner communal world—an edenic
scene in which she encounters layer upon layer of fruitful gardens—an
image of “the plenty . . . the richness and generosity” of the food-giving
surfaces of the earth (158).
The movement of the water through the beautiful garden that the
Survivor visits beneath the earth’s surface is another expression of
the dialectic of attraction and detachment, now imagined as a cycle
of expansion (the melting of the water) and contraction (the water’s
evaporation).24 The water running through the runnels and surrounding the beds in the garden is fed by water from the snow-capped mountains in the distance, carefully controlled by the gardener, whose duty
is to see that it “ran equally among the beds” (158). This movement
of the water through the garden also suggests the flow of blood from
the heart to the rest of the body, an analogy found in much mystic
literature in which the heart is compared to a garden.25 If the garden is
symbolic of the heart, then the gardener embodies the spiritual understanding that keeps clear the channel for the flow of the water of the
spirit through all aspects of the individual’s life.
The rhythmic cycle of “expansion and contraction” associated with
the heart-garden symbolism structures Memoirs. It is perhaps best
represented by the Survivor’s movement back and forth between the
conscious world of memory and reflection, as well as the inner worlds
of personal and collective unconscious discovery. Detachment from
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the outer world, a kind of contraction or purification of the heart,
feeds attachment or attraction to the discoveries of the inner worlds,
where the Survivor’s inner being expands and develops. Each feeds the
other—understanding acquired through her observation of her past as
embodied in Emily affects what she can perceive in her inner worlds,
and this deepened spiritual understanding in turn stays with her and
alters her perceptions and behavior in the outer world. The Survivor’s
ability to see the futility of Emily’s (and thus her own) earlier attempts
to apply purely material solutions to cultural devolution in the outer
world (she pictures Emily’s fruitless work in the commune as the work
of a “sorcerer’s apprentice” set to sweep dying leaves in a “spiteful garden” [152]) frees the Survivor to view the various impersonal rooms
of the inner world as if “from above” or to “move through them so
fast that I could visit them all at once and exhaust them” (156). It is
only after acquiring this detachment in the inner and outer worlds that
the Survivor is enabled to see the multilayered gardens. The culmination of the garden scene and the gift of the Survivor’s new detachment is her intuitive awareness of that “person whose presence was so
strong in this place, as pervasive as the rose-scent” (158). Following
this moment of attunement to her inner spiritual guide, the Survivor
becomes capable of maintaining “a knowledge of that other world,
with its scents and running waters and its many plants, while I sat here
in this dull shabby daytime room . . . as if that place were feeding and
sustaining us, and wished us to know it” (159). We will see below that
this new knowledge will allow the Survivor to deal with increasingly
difficult experiences in the outer world.
Buoyed by the new hope that her sense of the luminous face brings,
her spirit expanded by growing attunement to the divine spark within,
the Survivor is now prepared to face the culmination of the devolution
in the ordinary world—the discovery of the new breed of children. The
final efforts to gain the necessary detachment to deal with the children
will enable the Survivor to complete her journey of transformation.
As opposed to the luminous face sensed in the collective dream world,
these children represent the monstrous face of a terrible new birth, the
outbreak into the daytime world of humankind’s undealt-with collective shadow.26 Brought into the world by the destruction of old modes
of organizing society and grounding the self, these children point both
to the utter failure of these old modes of being and to civilization’s total
ignorance of other ways of understanding itself—its lack of awareness
of its psychospiritual underpinnings and of a spiritual center capable
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
59
of holding together the disparate forces of modern life. Political and
social forces alone as modes of organization have been proven inadequate by the collapse of Emily and Gerald’s commune, and Gerald’s
desperate clinging to his concern for the cannibal children leaves him
their victim, not their leader. The children’s spiteful and totally anarchistic vitality is the underside, the denied shadow, of a purely material
understanding (whether individualistic or communal) of well-being.
Gerald’s inability to give up on the children again reminds one of
Levinas’s dictum of the moral claim of the other. Here Lessing seems to
suggest that this claim cannot be fully realized without being placed
within a spiritual framework. It is the journey toward a purified heart
that will allow the Survivor finally to realize the moral claim of the
cannibal children and to bring them with her into another realm of
understanding and being.
The Survivor’s journey to detachment is not done in isolation but
instead involves commitment to those in need around her. Rescuing a
despairing Gerald from destruction by the children, Emily, along with
the Survivor and Hugo, presents a counteractive force to the devolution of the outer world. The four of them now united in the Survivor’s
apartment wait out the long, dark winter of spiritual trial and patience,
a necessary time of purification and suffering before they can be admitted again behind the wall, this time to encounter one last symbol
of the old world—a black pockmarked iron egg.27 Polished by their
painful efforts to develop and grow, pockmarked by their errors and
shortcomings, this symbol of their old way of being breaks open when
confronted with the presence of not only Emily, Gerald, and Hugo but
also Emily’s mother and father and four-year-old Dennis, one of the
cannibal children holding Gerald’s hand. The presence of all these figures together marks the Survivor’s ability to acknowledge, understand,
and accept the aspects of reality these figures embody as essential to
who she is. She brings with her in her experience of psychospiritual
transformation Emily, her younger self; Gerald, the symbol of her
social conscience; her parents, who have helped shape her personal
psychic life; the instinctive energy of the physical and the natural world
of Hugo; and the untamed, irrational vitality of the personal and collective shadow, the cannibal Dennis.
Through her work of inner purification, detachment from outworn
modes of thinking and believing, and acknowledgment and acceptance
of painful familial patterns, the Survivor is freed to see finally “the
one person I had been looking for all this time” (182). Experiencing
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the beauty of that luminous symbol of her innermost self, she is also
offered a guide into a new way of seeing and relating to the world.
Able to acknowledge fully and attune herself to the spark of the divine
within her, the Survivor is able to perceive the ground of being, the
divine spark, everywhere in the world. She is able to see what Sufi
writer Vaughan-Lee calls “the secret face of creation,” which allows
her “to see through the veils of illusion and glimpse the real beauty
that lies behind” (Vaughan-Lee 134–35). Thus the Survivor reaches
the state of inner attunement where she sees the face of God everywhere—what Ibn ‘Arabi calls “the self-disclosure of God.”28
In this framework Levinas’s dictum of the moral imperative of the
face of the other becomes a consequence of the moral imperative to
respond to the face (attributes) of God as reflected in the faces of all
other human beings. But the Survivor goes beyond that. Since some
of the attributes of God are reflected in all beings, the luminous face
also awakens the Survivor to the beauty of the natural world as well,
symbolized by the transformation of Hugo, Emily’s dog-cat, who now
appears as “a splendid animal, handsome, all kindly dignity and command” (213). The Survivor’s ability to see and follow the luminous
face of her own and her creator’s wisdom makes manifest for her
“another order of world altogether” in which not only is Hugo transformed but Emily, too, is “transmuted, and in another key” (213). In
this transformed world the energy of the stunted, deprived cannibal
children can also be accommodated and transmuted. Lessing’s dream
memoir provides the reader with both a key to her transformed vision
and a call to follow her into that other way of seeing.
Shikasta: Collective Spiritual Adventuring
If Memoirs is a fictional autobiographical account of Lessing’s spiritual
transformation following an initial moment of inspiration, then Shikasta is the product of her sustained mature spiritual vision. Having
portrayed in Memoirs the process whereby her alter ego, the Survivor,
becomes capable of recognizing and attuning herself to the transcendent
element within, the luminous face, five years later in Shikasta Lessing
portrays the process by which an entire civilization is enabled to attune
itself to the transcendent element through recognizing and obeying a
prophetic figure. However, in this monumental work Lessing goes a
step further and reveals the ongoing process by which transcendental
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
61
knowledge has been revealed from prehistory to contemporary times.
She does this through her use of the metaphor of different worlds to
explain varying levels of spiritual capacity or attunement. Shikasta is
an estranged, defamiliarized version of earth. Shikastans know nothing
of other individuals on other stars and are mostly out of touch with
both their innermost being and the spiritual forces operative in the cosmos. Canopus, the most evolved star in the galaxy, corresponds to the
realm occupied by those in continual touch with their innermost being
and thus with the will of the divine, here called the Necessity. Shammat, the rogue planet of the star Puttiora, an outlaw even in terms of
Puttiora’s low level of development, corresponds to the realm of those
who are totally out of touch with the Necessity, who have focused all
the power of their souls on greed and exploitation of others.
In an interview Lessing explicitly identifies the source for her vision
in Shikasta with her reading through the sacred books of the Middle East one after another. Thus she notes that Shikasta is “a very
regurgitated book because it all comes out of the sacred books” (“A
Conversation” 23). She further comments that all the great religions
of the Middle East “are the same religion, they just developed differently” (23). Thus the Canopeans seem to be closely associated with the
prophets and spiritual teachers of various sacred scriptures, and the
planet Shikasta with the domain of the earthly world. Shammat seems
to be the domain of the biblical devils and tempters. Both Shammat
and Canopus send envoys to influence the Shikastans. Thus Shikastans, representing the world of “fallen” humanity, can be influenced
to develop the capacities of their higher or lower selves, depending on
which otherworldly influences they respond to. Furthermore, as in the
Old Testament, Shikasta has a paradisiacal past, when it was called
Rohanda and closely connected to Canopus (and thus the divine).
With all of humankind’s biblical and secular history at her disposal,
Lessing can dare to let the imaginative symbols for spiritual communion and growth she used in Memoirs expand and flourish in Shikasta.
To begin with, Shikasta refigures the Survivor’s movement between her
inner and outer worlds, a movement that I associate with the contraction and expansion of the heart. In Shikasta this becomes the movement of the narrative between two realms—an outer-space narrative,
told from the perspective of Canopus, which frames the whole novel
and dominates the first half, and an inner-space narrative, seen mainly
through the eyes of the Shikastans, that predominates in the second
half of the work.29 Thus we begin seeing Shikasta from above, from the
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perspective of the infinitely more spiritually advanced Canopeans. This
view of Shikasta introduces us to the spiritual principles at work in the
novel’s cosmos. An understanding of these principles colors our perception of the earthlike planet. Thus, rather than assuming that humans
are basically self-serving and prone to violence, the view of what Frager
calls the lower self, Canopeans believe that Shikastans’ true reality is
one of cooperation, unity with the cosmos, and selfless love. Canopeans
themselves embody these qualities in their service to Shikasta, choosing to aid its evolution at the cost of great personal pain and difficulty.
Indeed, the Canopean envoy Johor begins his narration concerning his
three trips to Shikasta (couched as a report to Canopean administrators) by stating that one of his reasons for including the various documents he compiles about Shikasta in his reports is to demonstrate that
Shikasta “is worth so much of our time and trouble” (13).30
Just as the Survivor’s new understandings in the inner and outer
worlds of Memoirs feed each other (the detachment the Survivor gains
from her observations of Emily in the outer world feeds her attachment to the luminous face encountered in the inner world), so, too, we
gradually see that both narrative frames of Shikasta influence each
other. We slowly become aware that through their interaction Johor, in
the outer frame, and various Shikastans, in the inner frame, are aided
in their struggle to acquire detachment from lower levels of self and to
progress in their attraction to, and understanding of, the divine realm.
We will explore this interaction further below.
However, Shikasta takes the theme of spiritual progression found
in Memoirs a step further. On both Canopus and Shikasta, spiritual
progress (after acknowledging the divine realm) is tied to service to the
divine realm (the step after recognition of the divine), which inevitably
involves withstanding tests to one’s commitment and difficulties that
bar the way to service and understanding. We will see that both Johor,
the Canopean envoy to Shikasta through whose eyes we see most of
the outer frame of the first half of the novel, and Rachel Sherban, the
young Shikastan teenager through whose diary account we see much
of the inner-space frame of the second half, each struggle against the
forces within and without that act as barriers to their understanding
of, and service to, the divine.
This theme of recognition and service to the divine realm is partly
veiled by the complex retrospective narrative framing of the novel.
While Memoirs provided a retrospective account of an older woman’s
spiritual transformation, Shikasta is framed by the retrospective voice
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of Johor, the timeless male/female emissary from the star Canopus. His
reports back to Canopus on the situation he encounters on the planet
Shikasta during his three visits recount Johor’s own spiritual journey
from despair over Shikastan limitations and suffering to detachment
and a new appreciation of Shikasta’s long, painful road to spiritual
growth. Johor’s long look back at human prehistory and history, an
agonized description of the loss of primordial connectedness to the
source of all good, seems to be the mature Lessing’s explanation of the
ways of God to humankind. Now at the height of her visionary power,
Lessing is able to transmute the pain of her personal history (as seen
in her conventional autobiographies and her autobiographical fictions)
into humanity’s agonized efforts to mature spiritually.31 The challenges
of the human condition are now seen to involve inevitably the loss of
a sense of unexamined paradisiacal connectedness with an external
source of well-being. The suffering and hardship that ensue are part of
the means to spiritual growth.
Shikasta’s prolonged and profound investigation of the relationship between hardship and spiritual growth marks how far Lessing
has come from the earlier novel. In Memoirs this theme is portrayed
in a highly abstract way as the necessary struggle between constructive
and destructive forces encountered by the Survivor behind the wall.
On the realistic side of the wall the theme is symbolically conveyed
in the survivor’s interaction with the cannibal children. In Shikasta
this theme is now presented as the result of the necessary interaction
between beings at very different levels of spiritual understanding. In
both narrative frames it is this interaction that fuels the painful process
of spiritual growth.
Johor’s Outer-Space Narrative
For Johor in the outer-space frame the path to new awareness involves
not only his interaction with Shikasta but also his new awareness of
the role that both Canopus and Shammat play in Shikasta’s history.
One of Johor’s first insights as he begins his retrospective reporting on
his third visit to Shikasta is the realization that Canopus bears some
responsibility for the extreme nature of Shikasta’s suffering after its fall
from the paradisiacal state of Rohanda. This fall, he explains, is due
to an unforeseen and unavoidable accident of the stars that severely
cuts down the spiritual energy from Canopus that feeds the Shikastan
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reality (35–37). However, the Shikastans’ spiritual deprivation is also
vastly increased by the intervention of Shammat that siphons off most
of the spiritual energy left to the Shikastans, drastically worsening their
situation. Furthermore, Johor explains that Canopus had not fully
prepared the Shikastans for dealing with difficulties, thus making them
even more vulnerable in the face of Shammatan exploitation (35–36).
Johor can now admit that “on none of our other colonies have we
again been satisfied with an easy triumphant growth. We have always
inbuilt a certain amount of stress, of danger” (36–37). Thus Johor
begins to understand both the importance of experiences of hardship
in a people’s development and the need to take into account those with
“very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel” (36).32
The retrospective framing of Johor’s reports also allows us to watch
the process by which he grows spiritually as he observes Shikasta’s
apparent devolution. Thus we see Johor’s own spiritual growth through
his changed understanding of Shikastan suffering and evolution. Johor
begins his reports with his reflections as he embarks on his third visit
to Shikasta at a time of crisis in its late twentieth century shortly before
it experiences its Third World War. Acknowledging his feeling of “dismay” as he contemplates the Shikastan experience of the “slow leaking away of [spiritual] substance through millennia—and with such a
lowly glimmering of light at the end of it all” (13), Johor immediately
emphasizes the retrospective nature of his reports. He explains that he
is “deliberately reviving memories, re-creating memories” (14) of his
earlier two visits, especially that of his first—“the worst” experience
he has ever had as an envoy. Johor’s disturbing memories of his first
visit center on the catastrophic time of Shikasta’s fall. Deprived of all
but the faintest trickle of spiritual emanations from Canopus, Shikasta,
under Johor’s horrified gaze, moves overnight from a paradisiacal garden to an ugly, weed-infested desert. The peaceful, spiritually attuned
early civilization becomes a collection of barbaric tribal groupings
made up of frantic individuals, out of touch with themselves, each
other, the natural world, and Canopus.
Johor’s memories of both his first two visits are filled with his painful response to Shikastan suffering, such as having to tell the indigenous
peoples that “they would become less than shadows of their former
selves” (68). He reflects at the beginning of his third visit that “I have
scarcely thought of [Shikasta] between that [first] time and this. I did
not want to. To dwell on unavoidable wrong—no, it does no good”
(14). After his second visit (when he has to help destroy irredeemably
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
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corrupt Shikastan cities), he retreats into what Dominick LaCapra in
his work on historical accounts of trauma calls “objectification” to
deal with his pain (99): “I kept my thoughts well within the limits of
my task” (14).33
The tone of Johor’s report at the beginning of his third visit, in the
Shikastans’ late twentieth century, while expressing “dismay,” also suggests a spark of new understanding of “the stubborn patience needed
[by the Shikastans] to withstand [spiritual] attrition” (13). As Johor
steps back from his own expectations and very different understanding of the universe and begins to open himself up to how Shikastans
perceive their reality, he becomes capable of a new kind of empathetic
understanding of their plight. This new understanding requires a new
form of reporting (LaCapra 103–4). Thus Johor begins to reflect consciously on “the problems of reporting adequately” (196).34 Aware
that his “notes were being read by minds very far from the Shikastan
situation,” Johor “devised certain additional material, to supplement
[his] reports” (196). Through the inclusion of “sketches” and stories
of various kinds of Shikastans (for example, showing both colonialists
and indigenous peoples as victims), as well as additional explanatory
information that was not requested, Johor tries to capture the reality
of the Shikastan situation for Canopeans with very different “expectations and imaginings of Shikasta” (196). In these reports we see Johor
learning to understand and convey a new respect for Shikastan dignity
in the face of suffering and to recognize the kind of strength out of
which it grows.
In his last special report Johor describes a man and a woman looking at a perfect “golden chestnut leaf in autumn” (255): she takes
solace in the understanding that “the laws that made this shape must
be, must be [sic] stronger in the end than the slow distorters and perverters of the substance of life” (256). He glances out the window at
the tree that produced this leaf and sees not just the “ordinary treein-autumn” or “the seethe and scramble and eating” that is truth of
its biological being but another tree—“a fine, high, shimmering light,
like shaped sunlight” (256)—the tree’s underlying spiritual reality that
feeds the tree’s essence. Just as the Survivor after her transformation
sees the world irradiated by the light of the face of God, so a few
Shikastans, driven beyond their usual limitations, are able to see the
spiritual reality that lies hidden within phenomenal reality.35 Johor
is thus able to conclude his special report with an acknowledgment
that Shikastans, although “infinitely damaged, reduced and dwindled
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from their origins,” are “reaching out with their minds to heights of
courage and . . . I am putting the word faith here. After thought. With
caution. With an exact and hopeful respect” (257). Here we see the
fruit of Johor’s detachment or, put another way, of his new ability to
experience what LaCapra calls “empathic unsettlement” (102). Rather
than being overwhelmed by pain at identification with Shikasta’s loss
of spiritual attunement, Johor is able to distance himself enough to
appreciate both their pain and their courage in coping.
We do not fully appreciate how much Johor has evolved in his
understanding of, and respect for, Shikastan detachment and courage
until we see the fruits of his inner growth in his behavior when he is
born into Shikastan reality in the second half of the novel. As George
Sherban, with no direct memory of his Canopean past, he is able to
withstand the powerful egotistical, divisive pressures of Shikasta, to
detach himself from the rampant pain and misery surrounding him,
and to attune himself to the unifying forces associated with Canopus.
His openness to Canopean influence is suggested by his attraction to
the stars as a child, his willing acceptance of the special education he
receives from a series of unique Canopean visitors, and his ability as a
teenager to represent disparate races and contending groups. Thus from
the beginning George is able to grasp and model the forces of unity,
cooperation, and selfless love (the forces of Canopus) in Shikastan
reality and to make these constructive forces available to those around
him. He is eventually able, through the power of his words, to assist a
representative group of responsive Shikastans to attune themselves to
the unifying forces of Canopus and to survive their Third World War.
In short, Lessing frames her portrayal of a spiritual prophet capable of
saving the planet Shikasta from complete destruction in terms of the
retrospective growth in detachment and empathic unsettlement of the
Canopean envoy Johor (incarnated as George Sherban) and his ability
to bring his new understanding into service during his immersion in
Shikastan reality.
George’s words, the manifestation of his Canopean power on Shikasta, bring up another way in which Lessing reconfigures symbols
from Memoirs in this later work. While Memoirs uses the image of
the luminous face as the symbol of the call from deep within (and
without) that initiates the Survivor’s spiritual journey, in Shikasta it is
the symbol of words that awakens the Shikastans from their spiritual
sleep, their embeddedness in the world of the lower self, and calls them
to begin their journey of recognition, service, and steadfastness. Here
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Lessing seems to be explicitly drawing on the understandings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that God is revealed to humanity through
the words (and persons) of prophetic or divine figures as recorded in
the scriptures of the three faiths. In Shikasta we will see that the ability of George Sherban, the incarnation of Johor in Shikastan reality, to
influence Shikastans resides primarily in the power of his words. His
words have the capacity to awaken their minds, educate their hearts,
and motivate their wills to serve him (and thus Canopus).
The Shikastans’ Inner-Space Narrative
The pattern of the retrospective spiritual journey that structures both
Memoirs and the outer-space frame of Johor’s narrative is also found
in the inner-space narrative of the second half of Shikasta, concentrating on the spiritual struggles of George’s sister, Rachel Sherban, and
other Shikastans. But again this theme of the spiritual journey takes
on a new life in Shikastan reality. Unlike the ever-deepening journey
to the center of the soul found in Memoirs, or the slow accumulation
of respect and detachment for the Shikastans that characterizes Johor’s
spiritual journey, when we enter Shikastan reality in the second half of
the novel, we find ourselves on the emotional roller coaster of teenaged
Rachel Sherban’s inner world. Through her diary account, we experience first hand the pain, fear, and, above all, confusion that reigns on
Shikasta. By using as her primary focal point a narrator whose spiritual
understanding is limited, Lessing forces her readers to experience and
identify with Rachel’s difficulties and the immense effort required to
gain spiritual perspective while on Shikasta. When Rachel dies without realizing her spiritual potential, readers are forced to reassess the
obstacles that hindered her spiritual development and undergo their
own empathic unsettlement. Thus the narrative structure of the book
contributes to the reader’s experience of its meaning.36 Eventually we
become aware of the transformation in others around Rachel, mainly
family members and friends, through their interaction with George.
These foil characters clearly demonstrate the need to withstand difficulties (especially the pull of Shammat or the lower self) in the path
of service to George (whose words carry the spark of the divine)
and help clarify the kinds of strengths that steadfastness develops.
But these understandings emerge most clearly through other narrative
documents after Rachel herself has died.
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Much of the second half of Shikasta concentrates on Rachel
Sherban’s retrospective insights as she begins the process of keeping
a diary in order to help her understand the unique spiritual qualities of her brother George. Rachel’s account of why she decides to
keep a diary is the first time we get a clear portrayal of the power
of words on Shikasta. It is the words of Hasan (presumably another
envoy from Canopus), one of the special individuals who comes to
help educate George, that first awaken Rachel’s soul. Hearing Hasan
speak to George, she suddenly grasps that beneath the simple surface
of his words there is another layer of meaning that George can hear
and that she cannot: “I could see from George’s face that in quite
ordinary things that were said was much much more. I just couldn’t
grasp it” (283–84). Like the ability to see the shimmering tree behind
the ordinary tree, Shikastans can only hear the deeper layer of meaning
in Hasan’s (or later George’s) words if they are ready. Because Rachel
has suddenly grasped that there is a deeper meaning in Hasan’s words,
Hasan suggests that she keep a diary in which she should “write an
account of [her] . . . childhood” (284). So Rachel’s retrospective diary
keeping is presented as Hasan’s encouragement of Rachel’s spiritual
growth.
This diary keeping begins when Rachel is only fourteen. Thus
Rachel is a much younger retrospective heroine than her counterpart
in Memoirs and, of course, than Johor in the first half of the book.
Representing an interesting recasting by Lessing of the role of a young
girl, Rachel is both similar to and different from Lessing’s earlier young
heroines. Like the young Martha Quest, Rachel is filled with emotions
she does not understand; she is even more sensitive than Emily to the
suffering of others; and she is crippled with a dangerous self-pity that
Lessing describes in Under My Skin as “a real enemy,” the weeping
child within who “transmogrifies into a thousand self-pitying monsters” (21). Like these earlier protagonists, Rachel also struggles to
understand the meaning of her situation, in her case through the keeping of her diary. Unlike those earlier heroines, however, Rachel does
not have to struggle as a young girl with a critical, inhibited mother
or a father whose childhood tickling leaves her with nightmares for
years. Nor is she damaged by the birth of a younger brother who
usurps her mother’s love. Moreover, her retrospective insights heighten
her self-awareness. Thus Rachel is one of the most fortunate of Lessing’s young heroines in terms of a highly supportive family and many
personal advantages: she is attractive, intelligent, and perceptive. She
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is, however, faced with a horrific world, a grimly realistic depiction of
the devolution encountered by Emily in Memoirs. Not burdened by
parental rejection, Rachel does not need to throw herself into this difficult world to offset a lack of parental acceptance or use her sexuality
to rebel against her parents; rather, Rachel fears adult experiences and
responsibilities and turns away from them back to the security of childhood and the protection of home. Thus it is her fear of involvement in
the threatening world rather than her dangerous embrace of experience
that limits her.
What is most interesting about this portrayal of female coming
of age in a difficult period is that this time Lessing places her young
protagonist in the context of a spiritually coherent universe. Influenced
by our exposure to Johor’s reports and to Canopean values in the first
half of the novel, we see Rachel, and indeed all Shikastans, both from
their own perspective and, simultaneously, from the Canopean perspective.37 Holding in mind both perspectives, we are prevented from
overidentifying with Rachel’s despair and the horrors of her world. We
empathize with her struggles to understand the nature of George’s
unique being and the meaning of the pain and suffering surrounding
her, but at the same time we feel a certain detachment from them. As
Gayle Greene points out, we have already encountered Rachel in the
first half of Shikasta (167), having been introduced to her soul-self,
Rilla, a representation of immortal aspects of her identity, on Zone Six.
This “twilight” realm of grief and regret is where Shikastan souls go
after death if they have not withstood the temptations of Shikasta—the
tendency to fall into “self-indulgence and weakness” and “forgetfulness” (21). The only way out of Zone Six’s enervating atmosphere is
for the souls to submit to being reborn into Shikasta and to try again
to keep alive some remnant of knowledge of their “purpose and will”
(20) in order to earn their way out of that terrible place. Rilla, like
others on Zone Six, has failed this test many times, perhaps because
she has developed mainly the capacities of what Frager calls the personal soul—the realm of intelligence and the ego (106–7)—but not
the deeper facets of the soul connected to the heart and faith. Thus
we see her despair (22) and are warned by Johor of her “locked violences” (23)—the tensions presumably arising when mind, heart, and
will are at odds with one another.38 We do not really understand the
significance of this inner tension until we see that on Shikasta Rachel’s
sympathy for her poor Moroccan neighbors and attraction to George
are undermined by the forces of what Frager calls “the negative ego”
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(107), in this case her fear, self-pity, and adolescent egotism. For example, when she learns of the death of her Moroccan friends, rather than
being motivated to help at the children’s camps (and indirectly help
the Moroccan couple’s children), she comments, “I wish I was dead
with Naseem and Shireen” (335). Over and over Rachel is told by
both George and her parents to “toughen . . . up” (331), but she seems
unable or unwilling to relinquish her idea of herself as too sensitive to
deal with the devolving world that she faces. While Rachel grows in
her understanding of George, herself, and her family, she is not able
finally to detach herself enough from the negative forces blocking her
and to fully respond to George’s guidance. Thus she does not play the
role that is potentially hers.
Rachel’s failure to mature spiritually is connected to her failure to
respond adequately to George’s guidance. Although her retrospective
diary keeping enables her to realize something of George’s unique
presence, she still allows her own fears and self-obsessions to interfere with her response to him. Twice Rachel is asked by George to
stretch her idea of her own capabilities—or, put differently, to detach
herself from her fears and weaknesses—and to play her assigned role,
which involves assuming responsibility for others less fortunate than
herself. The first time, when she is just eighteen, George asks her to
help Benjamin with the children’s camps, taking over the running of
the girls’ camp, a huge makeshift orphanage and school designed to
accommodate the fifty thousand Tunisian girl children orphaned by
the continual wars of late twentieth-century Shikasta. George had
already pointed out to Rachel how unusually well educated she is for
these difficult times (her parents are British-born professionals serving
as aid workers first in Morocco and then in Tunisia, and they have
seen to it that Rachel received a highly unconventional but broad
education). Rachel, however, cannot imagine herself dealing with such
a catastrophic situation and says no (341). After Rachel refuses to
take over the girls’ camp, George asks her to take over the education and upbringing of two orphaned children, Kassim and Leila,
who come from a family like Rachel’s and would be better off not in
the camps. Rachel agrees, but this caretaking becomes more difficult
when George tells Rachel that he and Benjamin (his twin brother) are
about to leave on an extended trip. He carefully instructs Rachel to
stay with the children in the flat while he is away: “I don’t want you
to leave here. I want you to remember that I said this” (345). Hearing these words, Rachel immediately recognizes their power, but she
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cannot deal with the implicit demand they make on her to stand firm
in the face of difficulties: “When I heard what he said, I was engulfed
in sickness. A blackness. . . . I felt that I should be absorbing something
and I wasn’t” (345). Thus we are not surprised when, after receiving
word from someone that George is scheduled to be killed by the ruling elite, Rachel rushes to try to warm him. She does this despite his
earlier instructions and despite the insistence of Suzannah, George’s
girlfriend, that George would not want her to go looking for him.
Disregarding both pleas and responsibilities, she gives in to a powerful
whirlpool-type force that sucks her in. Associated with the power of
Shammat, this whirlpool force was earlier seen on Zone Six, where it
almost swallowed up Rilla and Ben (189–92). Here on Shikasta, the
whirlpool force has been internalized and represents the pull of the
lower ego, which doubts and rationalizes the instructions of George.39
Rushing off to warn George, Rachel is eventually arrested and commits suicide. Her death is both needless and unhelpful. It confuses
George’s followers (she was impersonating George at the time of her
arrest) who now believe he can appear in two places at once. Further, it
was not necessary to warn George that his life is in danger, as we later
learn that he has survived nine attempts to kill him (363).40
In portraying Rachel, despite her ideal family conditions, as ultimately lacking in the detachment and emotional toughness needed to
survive and grow in her difficult world, Lessing seems to be reassessing the value of her own difficult early years and of the strength that
can come out of personal or family difficulties. It is Lessing’s mature
acceptance of suffering and difficulties as built into the structure of
the universe as the means to spiritual growth that characterizes her
portrayal of both Johor and Rachel. Both struggle to understand the
terrible experiences to which they are exposed. But Johor is given
countless millennia to gradually comprehend the pattern at work in
Shikastan evolution, while Rachel is only given a few years. However,
her failure is not presented as absolute. Her soul will presumably go
back to Zone Six, where she will be given another chance to enter into
Shikastan reality and deal with its challenges. Furthermore, Lessing
frames her portrayal of Rachel’s surrender to Shammat (the negative
ego) with the more positive struggles of her difficult older brother Benjamin (George’s twin).41
Far less perceptive than Rachel as a child and teenager, Benjamin
is particularly disadvantaged as George’s nonidentical twin brother.
Inevitably compared to and unable to keep up with his exceptional
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brother, Ben compensates by using the persona and “style” of the cynic
to cover his insecurity, always finding things “boring” (275). Through
Rachel’s eyes, we see Ben’s gradual change as he begins to follow
George’s guidance, first involving himself in the youth organizations
and then taking on the leadership of the children’s camps. Visiting him
at the boys’ camp, Rachel is surprised at how much people like and
respect him. She also sees that he is very good at what he does—“very
efficient . . . keep[ing] everything working properly” (337). Through
assuming this large responsibility, he acquires both confidence and
competence. Service enables Ben to begin to fulfill his potential.
From the paradigm hinted at in Memoirs and then more boldly
developed in the first part of Shikasta, we might suspect that in order
for Ben to access deeper levels of the self, he will be faced with difficulties. Ben’s big test comes when he is groomed for a position of
authority by the new Chinese administration in an effort to co-opt his
influence as the leader of the children’s camps. Through a letter back
to George from the midst of the Chinese “friendship tutorial” to which
he has been invited, we see the strengthened clarity and understanding of Ben’s thinking as he describes how he and three other followers
of George create through their words an atmosphere of unity that
the Chinese cannot destroy. It is an atmosphere that is characterized
as “clear and cool” (366, emphasis in original), where the delegates’
perfectly acceptable words could be interpreted on an entirely different
level. We recognize the unity-creating power of these words as attunement with the power of George’s words (with Canopus). Eventually,
Ben writes, even this “transparent” talk would stop and silence would
reign—“No need to say a word” (367). Ben is also detached enough
to describe how an unplanned visitor (presumably an emissary from
Shammat) is able to destroy that unity (368). Nonetheless, Ben does
not fall victim to Chinese manipulation and is presumably strengthened by the whole experience (we get insights into Ben’s character
development from later letters of a Chinese administrator [375, 377]).
We see the culmination of Ben’s new spiritual powers when he is able
to assist George at a climactic trial of the white race—bringing with
him the assistance of the junior youth whom he represents. They play
an important role in the successful staging of this trial that saves the
white race from being massacred by disaffected third-world youth. Following his invaluable service, Ben seems to have fulfilled his destiny;
we later presume that Ben is dead when we learn that George’s second
child is named after him (445).
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If Lessing’s depiction of Benjamin offers a clear alternative to
Rachel’s fate and reveals Lessing’s mature understanding of the role
that service to the divine guide plays in acquiring detachment and the
necessary overcoming of hardships that it involves, her portrayal of
older characters in the second half of Shikasta also shows the fruits of
this new understanding. Rachel’s mother and father, Olga and Simon,
are highly atypical Lessing fictional parents. Unlike the obtuse, selfinvolved mother and neurotic, damaged father of Martha Quest in
the Children of Violence series, of Emily in Memoirs, and of Lessing
in the autobiographies, Olga and Simon are ideal parents, open and
responsive to the needs of all three of their children. We see in the first
half of Shikasta how they are chosen by Johor as suitable parents for
George Sherban and his siblings, in part because of their “many useful
capacities,” including energy, good education, and “lack of regional
bias.” They are also “healthy, well balanced, [and] likely to be responsible parents” (258). We see these qualities in action in the second half
of Shikasta. Olga’s caring, wise responses to Rachel’s teenaged angst
are the antithesis of earlier, tension-filled mother-daughter interactions
in Lessing’s work. Above all, Simon and Olga’s ability to accept the
gift of George’s presence without fully understanding it defines what
is unique about them. As Simon explains to Rachel, “being George’s
parents we had to see things differently” (316). Their ability to see
things differently, to recognize George’s special status, allows them to
fulfill their potential as parents of a prophetic figure while getting on
with their own work of selflessly saving the lives of others.
In her portrait of Olga and Simon, Lessing provides us with a cameo
of life lived as a spiritual adventure. Its defining feature is not so much
professional success as openness to the divine guide in the person of
their son George and service (to their families, to others, to the special
reality that is George’s). Their willingness to include their children in
their professional lives, exposing them to many of the hardships they
themselves undergo, their ability to really listen to and talk to them,
even when they are busy and tired, their openness to the special status
of George, and finally their dedication to the well-being of others less
fortunate than themselves defines the quality of their lives. Death does
not seem to end this adventure, as suggested by Rachel’s response when
Olga dies: “I did not feel any grief because it did not seem to be indicated. Anyway, I don’t believe in death” (347).
I mentioned above the paradigm of overcoming difficulties on the
path to developing characteristics of the deeper self. We see this fully
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portrayed in a most unlikely representative of spiritual growth, service,
and the acquisition of detachment: Lynda Coldridge, a schizophrenic
who has spent most of her life in mental hospitals. As a young girl her
ability to hear voices was diagnosed as pathogenic, and the harsh treatment she received over the years due to her voices has led to bouts of
mental illness when she is out of touch with her own spirit, even her
surface identity. Despite all these difficulties, beneath her loss of selfesteem and outward degradation, she has maintained her trust in the
authenticity of her experiences. When she is finally befriended by Dr.
Hebert, a sympathetic psychiatrist, she is able to use her capacities constructively, teaching him to acquire some of her ability and eventually
tuning in to the voice of George. Lynda’s integrity in the face of lifelong
oppression from the outside world and, at times, mental breakdown
gives her a tremendous inner strength and detachment that allows her
to be an inspiration to Dr. Hebert and utterly steadfast and reliable
in her service to George. As with other characters, it is this quality of
attraction and service to George that fosters her inner development.
Although she foresees the catastrophic war to come, she does not
succumb to fear but calmly plays her role as the dispatcher of useful
telepathic people to safe places chosen by George. Her selflessness and
dedication allow Lynda to remain detached from her own approaching
death and to trust fully in her deepest self, her voices, especially the
voice of George.42
When the inevitable Shikastan Third World War does come, the
tension between constructive and destructive forces that has dominated Shikasta’s history is played out again, this time with the emphasis on the positive—the birth of a new civilization. Those Shikastans
sufficiently attracted to George (and their deeper selves) to follow his
guidance survive, and, despite initial terrible crises and catastrophes,
a new world starts to emerge. With their numbers greatly reduced,
Shikastans now receive sufficient spiritual energy from Canopus to
thrive again. As the various edenic cities spring up once more, shaped
in the forms of the old ideal cities before the fall out of alignment, Shikastans are able again to perceive and live lives attuned to the spiritual
emanations of Canopus. Hence the symbolic new world experienced
by the Survivor at the end of her account of her spiritual journey is
here made available to the many and manifested in the phenomenal
world. This is the gift of Lessing’s mature vision, the fruit of her retrospective meditation on first her personal past and then our collective
mythic past.
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
75
Conclusion: Lessing’s Spiritual Maturity
The cycle of spiritual development begun in Memoirs as a symbolic
inner movement of attraction and detachment experienced by the
author’s alter ego is externalized in Shikasta into a fuller cycle that
includes active service in the world to the spiritual realm embodied
in the prophet George Sherban, followed by inevitable hardship and
the need for steadfastness. Overcoming the difficulties encountered on
the path of service strengthens the progress on the spiritual journey.
This cycle, which involves the engagement of the heart, mind, and will,
is enacted on various levels and extended to all those who respond to
spiritual guidance. This more concrete portrayal of spiritual growth
in very different kinds of people is the product of Lessing’s mature
retrospective spiritual reflection and growth. Furthermore, the portrayal of Johor’s slow, painful development to a level of detachment
that sustains him as he immerses himself in Shikasta’s limited, painful
reality and enables him to awaken and save a representative group
of Shikastans seems to reflect Lessing’s own growth in wisdom and
mature spiritual vision since her writing of Memoirs. In effect, in Shikasta she answers the question of where the Survivor goes after her
transformation at the end of Memoirs. Lessing, having portrayed her
own spiritual evolution in the autobiographical Memoirs, becomes
capable of tackling the presentation of humanity’s spiritual evolution
in Shikasta. The maturation of the Survivor’s transformed understanding opens the door to Lessing’s depiction of Johor, the envoy who
feels compelled by his position as a member of the Canopean Colonial
Service, that is, by his attunement to the power of spiritual “Love,” to
use his awareness to reach out to Shikastans despite the pain it causes
him (13). Lessing, also, like her far-seeing narrator, seems compelled,
despite loss of popularity and critical misunderstandings, to use her
growing awareness of humankind’s spiritual potential to attempt to
reach out to those who are less aware. In Shikasta, as Lessing moves
from the mature, distanced, mythic perspective of Johor in the first half
of the novel to the immersion in the immediate, painful realities and
limitations of Rachel’s perspective in the second half, she reaches out
not only to her confused youth and earlier young narrators but also
to all of us, offering us the benefit of her mature vision. Her sympathetic but detached portrait of Rachel’s doubts, fears, and confusion
suggests Lessing’s compassion for readers who identify with Rachel’s
complex weaknesses. Unable to deal with or see beyond the painful
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Part I: Doris Lessing
reality around her or to trust the full implications of her awareness
of George’s spiritual authority, Rachel falls victim to a lack of both
detachment from the ego and attraction to the divine.
Notes
1. Lessing uses the term “space fiction” in “Some Remarks” at the beginning of Shikasta. She uses the term “inner-space fiction” in the prefatory materials for Briefing for a Descent into Hell (1971).
2. See Aging and Gender in Literature, edited by Anne Wyatt-Brown and
Janice Rossen, for other examples of midlife creativity. In particular, look at
chapter 2, “Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton’s Politics of Old Age,”
in which Wyatt-Brown offers three different models for late lifestyle changes.
Lessing’s midlife change seems to fit the second trajectory, that of writers “liberated by the possibility of radical change” (52).
3. This statement is a recasting of Lessing’s famous comment that “I always
write about the individual and that which surrounds him” (Bigsby 1) to specifically include the spiritual domain. See my article “Sufism, Jung and the Myth of
Kore,” which begins with another recasting of that statement, again to include
the spiritual (99).
4.I wish to thank my friend Mark Keedwell for assisting me in understanding Sufi thought and doctrine. His insight and perceptiveness both in personal
communication and as the leader of a Sufi study group that I have been fortunate
enough to participate in have been an invaluable assistance.
5. Bahá’u’lláh (1817–92), whose name means “the glory of God,” declared
in 1863 that he was the latest in an ongoing series of Manifestations of God
sent to educate and spiritualize humankind. Lessing herself has no knowledge
of Bahá’u’lláh’s writings (personal letter to the author). However, they provide a
powerful explanatory tool for understanding levels of detachment and spiritual
attunement and for analyzing characters’ movement along a spiritual trajectory.
Furthermore, Bahá’u’lláh often reinterprets or extends Sufi symbols (see Saiedi
17–110).
6. Sherry Salman explains Jung’s theory of individuation as involving “the
differentiation and creative assimilation of psychic opposites, of the shadow and
other unconscious material. Its yield is the wisdom of the wholeness of life, and
‘amor fati’: acceptance and love of one’s fate” (68).
7.I borrow this tripartite division of the faculties of the soul from Báhá’i
psychiatrist H. B. Danesh’s work The Psychology of Spirituality, where he describes knowledge, love, and will as three capacities of the soul (49–50).
8. The first three dimensions of the soul, consisting of the mineral, vegetable, and animal soul, have evolved through the earlier forms of life and continue
to be an important part of individual well-being. Intimately connecting the human being with all other life forms, they identify the capacities of cohesion
(found in minerals), growth (found in plants), and movement and the passions
(found in animals). The fourth dimension, the “personal soul,” “is located in
the brain and is related to the nervous system” (106). As the seat of human
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
77
intelligence and the source of our psychological nature, it is the aspect of the
soul with which we are most familiar (Frager 4). The next three dimensions
represent purely spiritual capacities, which, like concentric circles, move toward
the core of the soul, wherein resides the spark of the divine within us (Frager
108–9).
9.Ibn ‘Arabi describes numerous spiritual meetings with Khidr, who is
called his “hidden spiritual master” (Corbin 32).
10. See “Sufism, Jung and the Myth of Kore” where I discuss The Marriages
Between Zones Three, Four, and Five in terms of Jung’s discussion of rebirth and
argue that the Providers are a personification of the Self (106–8).
11. Fahim interprets the “she”—“the presence of the impersonal rooms”—
in ways that are both similar to and different from my interpretation of the
luminous face. Fahim also sees her “not as a separate deity” but as “the crucial
mediator of different levels of perception which is the focus of the novel” (101).
Fahim goes on to argue that the narrator “integrates higher levels of understanding by concentrating on” three mandala symbols: the carpet, the “multilayered
garden,” and the final egg episode (101).
12. This definition of spiritual search agrees with Sufi values as explained by
Frager, who stresses that the Sufi tradition teaches the use of one’s experiences in
the world as part of the spiritual path and mentions service to others as one of
the paths to God (Frager 12–13).
13. While Ibn ‘Arabi bases his writings and practice on “the Islamic intellectual tradition” (Chittick, Self-Disclosure xi), he writes of being personally
awakened by experiencing a voice calling him away from the indulgences of his
life as the son of a wealthy nobleman (Addas 36). Later, however, he experienced
visions of various Messengers of God speaking to him, including Mohammed
and Jesus (ibid. 199). He also describes numerous meetings in the spiritual world
with the spiritual guide Khidr. The Sufi mystic Rumi was awakened by a particular individual, the “wandering dervish, Shams of Tabriz” (xi). The contemporary
Sufi teacher Idries Shah, who was Lessing’s mentor, writes at length of the importance of the teacher (34, 54, 128–30).
14. Ken Wilber notes that “the self at virtually any stage of development
can have various types of peak experiences . . . including [those] . . . of the
transpersonal realms. . . . But . . . these temporary states still need to be converted
into enduring traits if development into these realms is to become permanent”
(182–83). He also describes the kinds of impediments to psychic growth that
can occur at each stage in the psychospiritual life journey (see A Brief History of
Everything, ch. 9–13).
15. Fahim connects Hugo with the narrator’s “animal nature,” which needs
to be incorporated into her psyche (107). She also associates him with “reconciliation with the psychological level” as he was present during the narrator’s
“descent in the last episode of the ‘personal rooms’” (121).
16.According to Frager, the animal soul is located in the heart and through
the circulation of the blood allows for the ease of movement of animals. “The
animal soul [also] includes our fears, angers, and passions” (103).
17. See “Journeys of the Spirit: The Older Woman in Doris Lessing’s Work,”
where I interpret some of Emily’s experiences in terms of decisions made by the
youthful Lessing.
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18. Shadia Fahim, Debrah Raschke, and Roberta Rubenstein all connect the
six-sided room with a mandala symbol, which Fahim emphasizes involves “the
reconciliation of opposites and the balancing of levels of perception” (101).
19. Shadia Fahim also makes this point (100).
20. Shah writes that “unless the individual has learned to locate and allow
for the various patterns of coercive institutions, formal and also informal, which
rule him,” he will not be free to deal with others or reform society (frontispiece
of Walking in the Shade).
21. Jeanie Warnock discusses the “sadistic tickling” of Emily by her father
(15) and relates it to the narrator’s (and Lessing’s) attempt “to re-write her current self-narrative and find inner potentialities still waiting to be realized consciously” (12) in her article “Unlocking the Prison of the Past: Childhood Trauma and Narrative in The Memoirs of a Survivor.”
22. Fahim connects this dialect of opposites to the novel’s use of mandala
imagery, which she identifies as symbolizing the process of balancing different
modes of perception (101). In my article on Sufi and Jungian influences in Marriages, I also discuss Lessing’s “response to the emphasis in Sufi teachings on the
need to embrace seemingly contradictory or disparate aspects of experience”
(“Sufism” 100).
23.Nader Saiedi’s commentary on Bahá’u’lláh’s description of the spiritual
journey in The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys explains the nature of this
dialectic. According to Saiedi, “the entire structure of [both works] can be understood as the dialectic of negation and affirmation. . . . Love implies relinquishing
self-love in order to become united with the beloved. Knowledge implies going
beyond the immediate suffering in order to attain wisdom” (102–3).
24. This garden image is a beautiful expression of the dialectic possibilities
of gardens in Sufi iconography where water is associated with a double movement, in which the viewer’s gaze is carried “outward into the paradise of nature,
and . . . inward . . . to the water, its spiritual center. Generating ever-expanding
ripples, the fountain recommences the cycle of conscious expansion and contraction” (Bakhtiar 106; Fahim 252n43). Raschke writes on “the concept of the
garden as a symbolic landscape that redefines spirituality” (44), contrasting the
closed medieval garden with “the salvific garden [that] has fluid boundaries”
(52) in Memoirs.
25. For example, Bahá’u’lláh exhorts the individual, “In the garden of thy
heart plant naught but the rose of love” (Hidden Words, “From the Persian,” #3,
51). Using the work of Laleh Bakhtiar, Fahim describes how “the mystic must
encounter ‘the tree of life or immortality’ which grows in the ‘Garden of the
heart . . . the abode of intuition’” (Fahim 211).
26. The cannibal children also suggest Derrida’s centerless new world, which
he also describes as monstrous (see “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of
the Human Sciences”).
27. Unlike Sharon Wilson (14), I do not see the black pockmarked egg as
itself positive. Rather, I see it as the embodiment of the Survivor’s old way of being that she is now ready to discard. Fahim describes “the hatching of the egg” as
“the climax of the inner action” (132) and also finds the egg positive, associating
it with the philosopher’s stone and its black color with “wisdom and leadership”
(120).
Chapter 2: Navigating the Spiritual Cycle
79
28. This state suggests the belief of Ibn ‘Arabi that while God’s essence is unknowable, God’s attributes are found in all created things. Therefore, commenting on the writings of Ibn ‘Arabi, William Chittick writes that “everything in the
universe . . . is God’s self-disclosure . . . and, by having specific characteristics, it
displays the traces of God’s names” (Self-Disclosure 52). Thus the Survivor has
reached the state where the veil covering the divine presence in the world has
been lifted, and she sees “the traces of God’s names” in everything.
29. See Perrakis, “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space,” for a fuller discussion of these two perspectives and the significance of their interaction. Both
of these perspectives are part of the compilation of documents by Canopean
archivists relating to Canopean interaction (in particular, the interaction of the
envoy Johor) with Shikasta that constitutes the novel.
30.In “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space,” I argue that the assemblage
of documents compiled by Canopean archivists that constitutes Shikasta lays
bare the process by which Canopus comes to accept that Shikasta is worth the
sacrifices required.
31. See Perrakis, “The Whirlpool and the Fountain,” for a discussion of how
Lessing incorporates the personal pain of her childhood lack of attunement with
the mother and deepened loss of connectedness following the birth of her baby
brother in love, again (95). These same painful early experiences, which become
almost a personal myth of the fall from paradisiacal closeness to the mother, are
also found in Under My Skin and Memoirs.
32. See Perrakis, “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space,” for a discussion
of the theme of the interrelationship of all peoples in Shikasta.
33. LaCapra notes that one response of historians or teachers to dealing
with Holocaust testimonies is to retreat into “excessive objectification that restricts historiography to narrowly empirical and analytic techniques and denies
or downplays the significance of the problems of subject position and voice in
coming to terms with the implication and response of the historian with respect
to the object of study” (99–100). I wish to thank my colleague Jeanie Warnock
for introducing me to the work of Dominick LaCapra.
34. See my earlier discussion of the significance of Johor’s additional reports
in “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space” (232–34).
35. Lessing seems to be portraying the Sufi idea that “God is present and
finds Himself in all things, and man witnesses this presence and finding to the
extent of his capacity” (Chittick, Sufi Path 226–27). This concept is known as
the oneness of being. Sensitized by their hardships, the man and woman in the
Shikasta passage are now able to see the divine qualities of the tree as a “fine,
high shimmering light” (256). Fahim discusses this passage in her chapter on
Shikasta, noting that it indicates an ability to see beyond “the physical level”
and incorporates “knowledge of a different dimension” (210). Fahim also relates
this passage to the encounter by “the narrator of Memoirs” with “the ‘realm of
possibilities’ in her ascent” (214).
Gayle Greene also comments on this passage, noting that “Johor is drawn
into a compassionate involvement with Shikastans that goes beyond necessity,
into identification with the race that, though so nearly lost, is capable of heights
of courage and faith” (172). Greene does not, however, as I do, discuss how Johor develops both detachment and identification—“empathic unsettlement.”
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36. See “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space,” where I comment further
on how Lessing uses the structure of the novel to enable her readers to reach new
understandings (221).
37. Fahim develops this point even further and reads the presentation of
Rachel in terms similar to mine. She notes that “because of the way the novel had
been constructed, a distance is set up between us and Rachel’s point of view—a
distance that detaches us from identifying with her despite the fact that she represents the normative point of view” (217). Gayle Greene points out something
similar, noting that “we read knowing Rachel’s history in Zone Six, scrutinizing her story for signs that she is passing or failing her test. We have become
informed readers, have learned to see and hear in new ways—to hear double
meanings, to see a variety of possible perspectives on an event” (167).
38.In Zone Six we see how easily Rilla (and Ben, too) gets caught up in
the whirlpools of sand (the manifestations of Shammat [the realm of evil]) that
sweep through that zone swallowing everything in their path (189–92). A little
later they lose their focus and get totally absorbed in little blobs of light (263),
perhaps a symbol for the material distractions of Shikasta. While Johor is able
to save them on Zone Six from both the whirlpool and the lights, once born into
Shikastan reality they will have to respond to George (Johor’s manifestation in
Shikasta) in order to save themselves.
39. See “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space” for earlier references to
the whirlpool force as associated with Shammat (231–32).
40. Fahim reads Rachel’s death positively as an ascent “to higher levels” in
which “she guides others on the path” (224).
41. While there has been some discussion of Shikasta’s spiritual vision, as
I note above, there has been no close look at the spiritual dynamics governing characters’ abilities to recognize and respond to George Sherban. See, for
example, “Doris Lessing’s Prophetic Voice in Shikasta” by Jeannette Webber,
in Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing, and brief discussions
of Shikasta in essays by Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis and Josna Rege in that same
volume. Shadia Fahim gives a Sufi reading of Shikasta in Doris Lessing and Sufi
Equilibrium, and Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis looks at its spiritual vision as a marriage of psychospiritual and science fiction perspectives in “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space” Gayle Greene does an interesting comparison of Shikasta
and Milton’s Paradise Lost in her chapter on Shikasta in Doris Lessing: The
Poetics of Change.
42. Fahim associates Suzannah with “the physical side” of life, as opposed
to Lynda Coldridge, who works on developing “Capacities of contact” and notes
that both “are indispensable for the development of humanity” (232).
Works Cited
Addas, Claude. Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arabi. Cambridge:
Islamic Texts Society, 1993.
Bahá’u’lláh. The Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh. Trans. Shoghi Effendi. 1986.
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———.The Kitáb-i-Íqán: The Book of Certitude. 1950. Trans. Shoghi Effendi.
Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1974.
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———. The Seven Valleys and The Four Valleys. Trans. Marzieh Gail in consultation with Ali-Kuli Khan. 1945. Wilmette, IL: Bahá’í Publishing Trust, 1978.
Bakhtiar, Laleh. Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976.
Bigsby, Christopher. “Interview with Doris Lessing.” In The Radical Imagination
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1982.
Chittick, William. The Self-Disclosure of God. Albany: State U of New York P,
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———. The Sufi Path of Knowledge. Albany: State U of New York P, 1989.
Cohen, Richard. “Introduction.” Face to Face with Levinas. Albany: State U of
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Corbin, Henry. Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Araby. Trans. Ralph
Manheim. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970.
Danesh, H. B. The Psychology of Spirituality. 1994. Rev. ed. Hong Kong: Juxta
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Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” 1967. In Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, 278–93. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 1978.
Fahim, Shadia S. Doris Lessing and Sufi Equilibrium: The Evolving Form of the
Novel, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Frager, Robert. Heart, Self, and Soul: The Sufi Psychology of Growth, Balance,
and Harmony. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House, 1999.
Galin, Muge. Between East and West: Sufism in the Novels of Doris Lessing.
Albany: State U of New York P, 1997.
Greene, Gayle. Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan
P, 1994.
Harvey, Andrew, ed. The Essential Mystics: The Soul’s Journey into Truth. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1998.
Jung, Carl. “Concerning Rebirth.” In Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, 113–47. Vol. 9, Part 1 of The collected Works of
C. G. Jung. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969.
LaCapra, Dominick. Writing History, Writing Trauma. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.
Lessing, Doris. Briefing for a Descent into Hell. New York: Knopf, 1971.
———. Interview. “A Conversation with Doris Lessing: ‘Lucky the culture where
the old can talk to the young and the young can talk to the old.’” By Billy
Gray. Doris Lessing Studies 24, nos. 1 and 2 (Summer/Fall 2004): 1, 23–30.
———. Martha Quest. 1952. London: HarperCollins, 1993.
———. The Memoirs of a Survivor. 1974. New York: Vintage, 1988.
———. Re: Colonised Planet 5: Shikasta. Vol. 1 of Canopus in Argos: Archives.
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———. “Some Remarks.” Foreword to Shikasta, ix–xi. London: Jonathan Cape,
1979.
———. Under My Skin: Volume 1 of My Autobiography to 1949. New York:
HarperCollins, 1994.
———. Walking in the Shade: Volume 2 of My Autobiography, 1949–1962.
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Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. “Journeys of the Spirit: The Older Woman in Doris
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———. “The Marriage of Inner and Outer Space in Doris Lessing’s Shikasta.”
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———, ed. Spiritual Exploration in the Works of Doris Lessing. Westport, CT:
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———. “Sufism, Jung and the Myth of Kore: Revisionist Politics in Lessing’s
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———. “The Whirlpool and the Fountain: Inner Growth and love, again.” In
Perrakis, Spiritual Exploration, 83–108.
Raschke, Debrah. “Cabalistic Gardens: Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor.” In Perrakis, Spiritual Exploration, 43–54.
Rege, Josna. “Considering the Stars: The Expanding Universe of Doris Lessing’s
Work.” In Perrakis, Spiritual Exploration, 121–34.
Rubenstein, Roberta. The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the
Forms of Consciousness. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979.
Rumi. The Essential Rumi. Trans. Coleman Barks with John Moyne, A. J. Arberry, and Reynold Nicholson. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1995.
Saiedi, Nader. Logos and Civilization: Spirit, History, and Order in the Writings
of Bahá’u’lláh. Bethesda: UP of Maryland, 2000.
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Cambridge Companion to Jung, ed. Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terrence
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Shah, Idries. Learning How to Learn: Psychology and Spirituality in the Sufi
Way. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn. Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork and Jungian
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Warnock, Jeanie. “Unlocking the Prison of the Past: Childhood Trauma and
Narrative in The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Doris Lessing Studies 23, no. 2
(Winter 2004): 12–16.
Webber, Jeannette. “Doris Lessing’s Prophetic Voice in Shikasta: Cassandra or
Sibyl?” In Perrakis, Spiritual Exploration, 63–79.
Wilber, Ken. A Brief History of Everything. Boston: Shambhala, 2000.
Wilson, Sharon. “The Cosmic Egg in Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.” Doris Lessing Studies 23, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 13–17.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. “Another Model of the Aging Writer: Sarton’s Politics of
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———. “Introduction: Aging, Gender, and Creativity.” In Wyatt-Brown and
Rossen, 1–15.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M., and Janice Rossen, eds. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1993.
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C hapter 3
Through the “Wall”
Crone Journeys of Enlightenment and Creativity
in the Works of Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood,
Keri Hulme, and Other Women Writers
S haron R. W ilson
Frequently, the aged and aging narrators and personas in recent women’s literature are viewed as Medusa monsters like the one at Avilion, the Tennysonian estate in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.
Looking out from wrinkled and deteriorating bodies, their gazes may
indeed seem like freezing evil eyes, partly because we are afraid to see,
hear, and know what they know—views usually at odds with official
or approved opinions. Like the unnamed narrator of Doris Lessing’s
Memoirs of a Survivor, these women who watch, analyze, and speak
out about the destruction around them may seem cold and unfeeling,
resembling the Stone Angel in Margaret Laurence’s novel of this title.
Sometimes, like Rosario Ferre’s Aunt in “The Youngest Doll,” their
rage over being used emerges subversively in their creations or, like
Maryse Condé’s Tituba, they are even hanged as witches and speak
after death. Nevertheless, as in Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” where a mother saves the daughter married to Bluebeard, their
wisdom helps structure other women’s escapes and sometimes promises to save humanity.
Crone figures in the works of many contemporary women writers
are based in myth. Part of the Great Goddess, the crone aspect of the
cycle is Hecate and the old moon, differentiated from the Diana or
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the virgin (new moon) and Venus or the mother (full moon) but, like
other phases of the Triple Goddess, suggesting the moon in all three of
her aspects. Although the crone is the “old” aspect and may be associated with death, she is not of a fixed age and also suggests rebirth.
Wise, a heavenly midwife, and the deity of magic and prophecy, in the
early Middle Ages Hecate was labeled queen of the witches (Walker
378–79), illustrated by the plotting witches in Macbeth. Other figures
representing the dark aspect of the moon include fairy-tale witches
in “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow White,” female vampires, and werewolves. Discussing the woman as nature and nature as monster themes
in reference to the “bumper crop” of Hecates (often portrayed as ice
or rock) in Canadian literature, Margaret Atwood points out that
Hecate or the crone “is not sinister when viewed as part of a process”
(Survival 199–201).
Mother of all the gods and of the past, present, and future, like
other aspects of the Great Goddess, and represented by the crone
moon, Medusa is closely related to Hecate and is also the basis for
crone figures in contemporary women writers’ works. Also connected
to the Cretan snake goddess (Pratt 28–29), Medusa was the serpent
goddess of the Libyan Amazons, a gorgon associated with menstrual
blood and once thought to turn a man to stone and with female
genitalia “lacking” a penis (Walker 629; Pratt 34–35). Like other
females either associated with snakes or actually snakes or dragons
(e.g., Keats’s Lamia), Medusa’s power threatened patriarchy so much
that men such as Perseus and St. George established themselves as
heroes by beheading her, symbolically castrating her (Freud 105; Pratt
30). According to Freud, Medusa “is a representation of a woman as
a being who frightens and repels because she is castrated.” Thus, since
“To decapitate =s to castrate,” her horrifying decapitated head represents the fear of castration (105–6).
Sometimes considered masked to those not ready to be initiated to
her mysteries, “to the Greeks, Medusa represented ‘the Ugly bogeyErinys-side of the Great Mother’” (Harrison 193–94). Ironically
demonized in patriarchal religions in the same way as Eve, the biblical
snake, and the snakes that adorn her hair and the arms of the Minoan
snake goddess, Medusa, like Persephone, may have been a rape victim,
one of many women to whom gods “descend.” In the medieval period
she was thought to be so beautiful that no one could bear to look at
her, the embodiment of a feminine sensuality considered “a monstrous
crime against womanhood.” Often, she has signified not only the fear
Chapter 3: Through the “Wall”
85
of female beauty but also “maternal anger and the threat of feminine
revenge” (Pratt 40).
Most significantly, like Hecate, Medusa actually symbolizes divine
female wisdom, often the “all-judging eye of wisdom” (Walker 629).
For poets, Medusa is an archetype of female creativity, of “powers previously hidden and denigrated” (Pratt 55, 40). Often the Medusa gaze
has been considered the artist’s ability to impose “beauty and form
upon the chaotic flux of experience” (Hazel Barnes, qtd. in Pratt 38);
thus, the female artist has been seen as the opposite of the nurturing
mother and, therefore, a monster.
However, as the references to castration suggest, male and female
writers do sometimes see Medusa crones differently: “For [Robert]
Graves, as for most British and American male poets, the Medusa
archetype is dominated by her negative content, distancing them from
any blessings that might lurk behind her mask. . . . [African American
male] poets tend to associate the classical Medusa with the threat of
being lynched/castrated through seduction by a white woman” (Pratt
59, 70). Male poets who treat Medusa negatively, often approaching
Medusa with Perseus’s perspective, include Robert Bly, Joel Oppenheimer, Howard Nemerov, Robert Hayden, and Robert Lowell (Pratt
43, 42–50). Although some female poets, such as Kathleen Raine, “perceive Medusa through gynophobic lenses,” “twentieth-century women
poets tend to seek out powers hidden in ‘denigrated’ archetypes such
as Medusa” (Pratt 51, 63). A number of canonical male writers have
looked to female muses to inspire their poems. But these muses are
generally described as young, beautiful, and fickle (Shakespeare’s Dark
Lady, Marvell’s Coy Mistress), and sometimes femmes fatales such as
Heine’s Loreley and Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci and, especially,
Lamia, who is a snake. Often considered a witch or bitch in men’s
literature (e.g., Steinbeck’s East of Eden, O’Neill’s Before Breakfast,
Chaucer’s Wife of Bath in The Canterbury Tales), women who have
evolved beyond woman-on-a-pedestal and sex-object-bound-for-garbage positions (see Mailer, “The Time of Her Time”) are often perceived as Medusa images, frequently recognized by women writers
as part of themselves (Condé’s Mama Yaya). Again, however, critics, especially males, have sometimes misinterpreted Medusa imagery.
Thus, Frank Davey finds Atwood’s female artists paralyzed: “Yet for
Atwood art itself seems inevitably to possess the ‘gorgon touch’ and to
transform life into death, flesh into stone. . . . Atwood’s poems circle
back on themselves, recreating one central drama of artist-woman
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engaged in an unsuccessful struggle to escape art for mortality” (149,
151–52; see Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy 150).
Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Toni Morrison, May Sarton, Keri
Hulme, Margaret Laurence, and Maryse Condé all use characters who
are Hecate or Medusa crones. All use their Medusa vision to discover
creative possibilities within themselves and their Medusa touch to
establish or reestablish human contact. Because scholars often do not
recognize Great Goddess symbolism, including Medusa, as one dimension of the Goddess, few readers would associate Sethe’s goddess touch
in Morrison’s Beloved with either Isis or Medusa. As Paul D puts it,
Sethe, who wears a goddess tree of life on her back but is considered a
monster, makes him whole: “She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she
gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.” In this
metafiction about the need to “rememory,” resee, and then move on
from the story of slavery, it is only appropriate that he wishes to put
his story next to hers (272–73; see Wilson, “Morrison”).
Concerned especially with artists like herself, the mature narrator
in Sarton’s Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing says that “We
are all monsters . . . we women who have chosen to be something
more and something less than women!” (155–56). Thus, in portraying
women’s journeys toward wisdom, Louise Bogan, May Sarton, Margaret Atwood, and other women poets recall and usually revision mythic
Medusas. Although Bogan’s persona suffers the classic paralysis when
she meets “the stiff bald eyes” (1569), when the persona of Sarton’s
“The Muse as Medusa” has the courage to look at Medusa’s face, she
sees it as her own face and begins the road to healing and wisdom.
Imagining herself as a naked fish, she swims in mystery:
Forget the image: your silence is my ocean,
And even now it teems with life. . . .
I turn your face around! It is my face,
That frozen rage is what I must explore—
Oh secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place!
This is the gift I thank Medusa for. (1690–91)
As Sarton’s artist elaborates in Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, once you recognize Medusa, “It is yourself who must be conquered”
(161–62). For female as well as male writers, the muse is always she
(180). Old women, Medusas and Hecates, can be muses, inspiring creation rather than destruction, beauty rather than frozen rage, teeming
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life rather than stasis. Atwood, too, speaks of her muse as a woman,
an old woman (Margaret Atwood: Once in August), but she insists
on the necessity of the woman writer to create rather than simply to
inspire and destroy in the tradition of Robert Graves’s “White Goddess” (“The Curse of Eve” 224) and presents struggles of narrators and
personas of various ages, such as that of Joan Foster in Lady Oracle, to
accept and evolve beyond selves perceived as monstrous. Doris Lessing
also alludes to aspects of the Great Goddess and speaks of old stories
as inspiring hers: “I always use these old, hoary symbols, as they strike
the unconscious” (Tomalin 174; Lessing, “Address”). Hardly doomed,
as Clement sees her, Medusa can laugh (Cixous 347–62) because she
sees and knows, and characters recalling her are able to talk back to
patriarchy. As Keri Hulme says in an interview, she also draws on old
stories and ancestors: “You can’t ever be alone: the air you breathe is
full of other people, other beings—and all their breathing—and you
yourself are a knit and weaving of a thousand generations” (“Keri
Hulme” 212). The Maori term for this concept in English is “Carrying
your ghosts on your shoulders” (Bryson 131). Hulme, too, uses old,
nearly infertile female bodies to hope “impossible things” through a
“cuckoo child”1 who helps return rather than displace family (“He
Hoha” [What a Fuss], qtd. in Fee 58–59).
When they are self-conscious narrators, aware of telling a story and
commenting on it, crone narrators express the growth of self-awareness directly through language: often beginning speechless, like the
tongueless, sacrificed maidens on the Sakiel-Norn planet of Atwood’s
The Blind Assassin, they gradually learn to use words to shape not
only their artist selves but also their whole selves, healed of body/mind
divisions (Surfacing, The Reckoning); of hand, heart, eye, and ear
amputations (The Blind Assassin); of societal diseases expressed in the
body (The Bone People, Bodily Harm); and of socially and culturally
conditioned madness (The Four-Gated City), repression, and low selfconcept (The Stone Angel, Martha Quest, The Edible Woman, Memoirs of a Survivor).
Not only do Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, Doris Lessing’s
The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five and Memoirs of
a Survivor, and Keri Hulme’s The Bone People present evolving crone
narrator-artists, but Atwood’s, Lessing’s, and Hulme’s books and their
authors also share a number of significant similarities germane to an
understanding of crone wisdom. Atwood and Lessing especially share
similar concerns and techniques. Both sometimes write dystopian/
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utopian, apocalyptic novels of ideas, both dramatize humanoid “others,” and both present somewhat autobiographical female narrators
who, as young women, are caught up in the beauty myth, in sacrificing themselves to others’ desires (Martha Quest, The Blind Assassin),
and in conformity (Cat’s Eye, Life Before Man, Martha Quest, The
Golden Notebook, The Fifth Child). Both have even inspired operas
and experimental music. While earlier works may see age as “the
dark,” the end of sexuality, and death (The Summer Before the Dark,
Cat’s Eye), texts written when their authors are older reveal a different
view of aging as a time of wisdom, creativity, and even love (Memoirs
of a Survivor, love, again, The Robber Bride).
Since Atwood, Lessing, and Hulme all grew up in colonized cultures, it is probably no accident that their characters have to struggle
to survive spiritually and even physically. Although Lessing grew up
in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as a colonial, and although she and Atwood
(and because of mixed heritage, Hulme to some extent) shared the
privileges of “whiteness,” they have all actively opposed institutionalized racism and imperialism. Their work (Atwood’s Survival, Lessing’s
Martha Quest and Canopus series, Hulme’s The Bone People) is explicitly or implicitly critical of both literal and secondary or metaphorical
colonialism. Atwood’s, Lessing’s, and Hulme’s narrators often watch
themselves and their worlds fall apart spiritually and physically before
they can take action to begin healing. Although Atwood’s narrators
are often folklore tricksters, all three writers sometimes use self-conscious, developing, partly unreliable narrators who practice writing as
a means of ordering, growing, and knowing in their metafictions (The
Golden Notebook; Memoirs of a Survivor; Marriages Between Zones
Three, Four, and Five; Lady Oracle; The Blind Assassin; The Bone
People). As postmodern and postcolonial writers, all three use popular culture intertexts, especially myths, fairy tales, and folklore, and
the characterization, images, themes, structures, and techniques (e.g.,
magical realism) associated with them, to portray their characters’
growth. Since Lessing’s and Hulme’s texts sometimes leave “realistic”
chronological and linear time for a mythic one, although characters
may worry about aging (The Summer Before the Dark), scar, suffer
illnesses or broken bones (The Bone People), or have difficulty taking
care of themselves (The Diaries of Jane Somers), the journey toward
wisdom is more spiritual than physical, sometimes involving movement through walls of the mind and the appearance of mythic beings,
including ghosts, shamans, and goddesses.
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Atwood has frequently focused on aging narrators and personas
associated with goddesses, as in her “aging female poet poems” (New
Poems 1985–86, Selected Poems [SP] II), where one persona, aware
of “the red life that is leaking / out of me into time,” wonders why
men want so much of her attention (“Aging Female Poet Sits on the
Balcony,” SP II 125). The persona of “Aging Female Poet Reads Little
Magazines” cannot remember if she was ever like the “young beau­tiful
women poets” who “write poems like blood in a dead person,” and
that of “Aging Female Poet on Laundry Day” scrupulously washes
everything as she thinks that “whatever exists at the earth’s center will
get me / sooner or later” (SP II 127, 129). In Good Bones (1992), the
persona of the final flash fiction speaks to her aging bones as she
would to a dog, praising them for tricks and urging them to “Keep
on going” (152–53). Atwood’s grandmother figures often have magic
healing hands (Bodily Harm, The Robber Bride) and, as in “Five
Poems for Grandmothers,” wisdom to pass on: “Sons branch out, but
/ one woman leads to another” (SP II 14). Some of her characters and
personas (e.g., Zenia in The Robber Bride; “Snake Woman,” SP II) are
snake women or snake goddesses. While the persona of “A Red Shirt”
sews a red shirt for her daughter, the moon is in its Hecate phase. She
not only connects Hecate and Medusa but also links them to storytelling as they inspire her own creativity:
But red is our color by birthright, the color of tense joy
& spilled pain that joins us
to each other. We stoop over
the table, the constant pull
of the earth’s gravity furrowing
our bodies, tugging us down.
The shirt we make is stained
With our words, our stories.
The shadows the light casts
On the wall behind us multiply:
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This is the procession
of old leathery mothers,
the moon’s last quarter
before the blank night,
mothers like worn gloves
wrinkled to the shapes of their lives,
passing the work from hand to hand,
mother to daughter,
a long thread of red blood, not yet broken
The persona then tells a story about the “Old Woman,” the weaver of
life threads (the Morae), the witch, the Black Madonna, worshipped
but “hated & feared, though not by those who know her.” Hoping to
protect her daughter from charms and fables, she sews a new “myth,”
the “private magic” of the poem, and “the air explodes with banners”
as her daughter delights in the shirt (SP 47–51).
Although Atwood depicts a number of witches, including the landlady in The Edible Woman, Auntie Muriel and even Elizabeth in Life
Before Man, Mrs. Smeath in Cat’s Eye, and the narrator’s mother and
Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale, as her narrator’s vision grows,
these witches turn into crones. In The Blind Assassin, not only Grandmother Adelia and Iris but also the young Sabrina are associated with
a promised Medusa vitality: “her long dark hair [is] coiled like sleeping
serpents” (288). Unlike many of Avilion’s residents, Iris and Sabrina
are more than marble fireplace ornaments and are able to meet a patriarchal gaze.
To a greater extent than Lessing, Atwood makes the physical dimensions of aging visceral, and she details male as well as female aging. In
The Blind Assassin Iris records her wrinkles and physical frailty more
meticulously than her earlier, stylized blonde beauty. In Atwood’s Life
Before Man Nate constantly paces his shadow as he runs toward death
as well as life and is afraid he will never be able to leap through the
glass of life to be involved, to be his mother’s son, a father, and a husband. In her Oryx and Crake, unlike the males of the created species,
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who will not age and will instead suddenly die at thirty, Snowman
examines his gray hair and sagging, starving body and calculates how
much longer he can live. Monstrous precisely because he is one of few
surviving humans, Snowman, the Abominable, still gains some wisdom
in his journey to tell his apocalyptic tale.
In Atwood’s most recent novel, The Penelopiad (2005), Penelope
has grown from a giggling fifteen-year-old prize in an archery contest
to a wise trickster crone. As in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” Odysseus must
“leave to seek a newer world” at least partly because he is “[m]atched
with an aged wife” (Tennyson 1213–14). We discover, however, that
Penelope is much more than an archetypal faithful wife. Speaking retrospectively from Hades, Penelope reports that the suitors called her
an old bitch and an old cow but admits to the truth in rumors that she
was jealous of her cousin Helen, that she slept with all the suitors—
more than a hundred—and supposedly gave birth to Pan. She may
even have ordered the deaths of the twelve maids, who were spying
for her, to keep them quiet about her activities. Although she does not
know everything, she still carries a sack full of words and continues to
speak with no mouth because she “like[s] to see a thing through to the
end” (4).
Atwood’s novels generally involve quests of fragmented, blind narrators who grow in vision and wisdom as they create. Like the traditional narratives Atwood often parodies, her recent novel, Oryx and
Crake, uses a male quester and a female muse, but in this case it is to
inspire both of its Frankenstein artists to monstrous creation. Mysterious and fickle but definitely a new spin on Shakespeare’s stylized Dark
Lady, Oryx represents an idealized perversion of the contemporary
sex-slave trade and the patriarchal gaze’s literal prostitution of its
object. The symbolic mother of the created species, Oryx is paradoxically also the book’s exterminating angel. Ironically dispensing a
product called BlyssPluss, providing unlimited libido and sexual prowess and protecting against sexually transmitted diseases, she sterilizes
people without their knowing it and, probably unknowingly, infects
people with the virus that may make the human species extinct.
In this metafiction steeped in its Frankensteinian culture of emptysocket vision, again paradoxically, the somewhat androgynous Snowman, more than Oryx, resembles Lessing’s, Hulme’s, and Atwood’s
crone narrators: he, too, journeys from silence and blindness in youth
to vision and art in old age. In a world where it is nearly impossible
to distinguish between cyborgs, monsters, and humans, Jimmy evolves
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toward “crone” wisdom by faithfully caring for the constructed creatures (the Crakers), for whom he has taken responsibility, and by
cherishing language and continuing to create against destruction even
when there are no materials for writing and little possibility of a listener for his tale.
Also depicting the sex-slave compulsion in the science fiction,
“novel,” and frame memoir narrative of a book within a book within
another book, The Blind Assassin is narrated in the first, second, and
third person by Iris Chase, a “blind assassin” crone who gradually
reveals and understands the extent to which she not only has been one
of her sister’s assassins but also has belonged to a culture of war, ruled
by men with “heads on fire” resembling Oryx and Crake’s scientists.
Iris is also one of Atwood’s recent wise crones, who reshapes her life
as she shapes her memoirs: she is no longer concerned with pleasing
father, husband, lover, or other women; no longer concerned with
shoes that match her dress, with being a lady, or with whether or not
she looks like a tramp.
Arising from what Atwood calls the same “UR-Manuscript,” “The
Angel of Bad Judgment” (Margaret Atwood Papers), Alias Grace, and
The Blind Assassin are period pieces about motherless main characters—self-conscious narrators—who evolve from youth to middle and
old age by constructing stories, and therefore meaning or truth, about
personal and public pasts. Both novels are metafictional puzzles about
the inconsistencies between appearance and reality: the appearance of
piety and propriety versus hidden murder, abuse, rape, and other violence (Wilson, “Magic”). In The Blind Assassin both Chase daughters
are raised to be “feminine”: beautiful, passive, polite, self-sacrificing.
Somehow Laura never manages to conform appropriately until she
convinces herself that she can bargain with God to save Alex—the
man both daughters love—in war. She remains silent about Iris’s husband Richard’s abuse, an event paralleled in the embedded science fiction novel by the sacrifice of mute virgins to the god of Sakiel-Norn.
For the self-conscious narrator Iris, Laura’s notebooks are the
doors to the forbidden knowledge of the Bluebeard fairy tale and the
key to unlocking her crone wisdom. These notebooks, hidden in a
trunk suggesting the subconscious, function similarly to the red plastic
purse and cat’s eye marble in Atwood’s Cat’s Eye. In the Grimms’ “The
Robber Bridegroom” and “Fitcher’s Bird” or Perrault’s “Bluebeard,”
the third sister, the bride and goddess figure, discovers the dismembered pieces of her sisters, the previous brides, behind the locked door,
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or alternatively, she sees another bride’s finger being cut off prior to
being cooked for the groom’s dinner. Similarly, Laura Chase’s notebooks, from the two sisters’ study with their tutor, Mr. Erskine, reveal
to Iris her amputated vision and touch—her complicity in her sister’s
death—and stimulate her, like the Robber Bride, to tell the story:
Although Iris withholds knowledge about the contents of the notebooks from readers until “The Golden Lock” chapter near the end
of her memoir, she discovers them in her stocking drawer the day
Laura dies, too late to keep from uttering the words that send Laura
over the bridge. . . . Iris symbolically releases herself as well as Laura
from the tragic plot. [She becomes the crone.] She says she has to
hurry and “can see the end, glimmering far up ahead of me.” She
admits that, like fairy-tale characters, she is “Lost in the woods, and
no white stones to mark the way, and treacherous ground to cover,”
but she has learned a few tricks and will set things in order. (Wilson,
“Magic”)
While the Latin notebook is about Dido and Aeneas, the geography notebook describes Port Ticonderoga, and the French one lists
words Alex wrote in their attic, Laura’s math notebook contains the
list of dates on which Richard tried to force, and eventually succeeded
in having, sex with Laura. Laura’s photograph of Alex, herself, and
Iris’s hand is pasted into the history notebook. Symbolically, however, resembling Atwood characters and narrators in You Are Happy,
Life Before Man, and Bodily Harm (Wilson, Margaret Atwood’s Fairy
136–228) and mythologically a sister of the Harpies, Iris is revealed as
a monster: her “hand”—her ability to express feelings openly—is lying
unmissed in Laura’s photograph until she takes responsibility for her
actions near the end of the novel and writes the story:
Because she learns to read the “code” of bruises with which Richard’s
bad touch marks her body, and the code of dates in Laura’s notebook
with which Laura similarly records his abuse, . . . Iris, like Laura,
stops being the wife of Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: Laura’s
abuse, like that of Iris, is no longer “papered over” (508), and Iris is
not the tongueless victim of her character’s science fiction story but
the bride who speaks out in “The Robber Bridegroom” fairy tale.
The person who appears to be “Laura’s odd, extra hand, attached
to no body . . . , [this] prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the
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dungeon in which the starved Laura is chained to the wall” (286),
leaves a steamer trunk of words. . . . She and her protagonist, “Iris,”
are no longer mute, sacrificial virgins or Blind Assassins of the science
fiction story or handless, helpless females. As in “The Girl Without
Hands” fairy tale, Iris’s cut-off hand grows back; as in the “Fitcher’s
Bird” fairy tale, Iris is able to reassemble the dismembered pieces of
herself. (Wilson, “Magic”)
This Medusa crone goddess, also Isis and the fairy-tale goddess, no
longer castrated or silenced and more than an avenging angel, is a messenger as her name suggests: she uses language to tell the stories of not
only her family, her lover, her country, and her century but also of all
peoples, including those imagined in outer space. Her wisdom is the
lesson that blind assassins are truly blind and, despite rhetoric, are still
assassins: wars for human, national, and cultural reasons nevertheless
maim and kill.
Often implying similar themes, Lessing, more than Atwood, explicitly marks the stages of awareness and the barriers to awareness in a
journey that is simultaneously inner and outer. This is especially clear
with the hierarchy of zones in The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four, and Five (1980). The hierarchy supposedly refers to degrees of
consciousness rather than the worth of beings, who Zone Three at least
says are equal. As Rubenstein suggests, “the very hierarchy of zones
metaphorically suggests the esoteric ascent toward wisdom. . . . Consistent with this metaphor, but with its own further symbolism, is the
alchemical marriage, in which the sacred union represents an aspect
of the ‘work’ toward the ultimate goal of inner enlightenment” (61).
Still, unlike the works of Atwood, this Lessing novel seems to have a
mostly reliable Chronicler (marked, however, with perceptions of Zone
Three) and an essentialist “good”; and it even has Providers, presumed
to know what is best for all, who govern the Zones.
At the beginning of the novel, as in the Oedipus legend and medieval
romance, there is a mythic curse or plague on the lands and embodied
in the characters of the three zones we come to know: human and
animal fertility is diminishing. As Fishburn suggests, the inhabitants of
Zones Three, Four, and Five are self-destructively isolationist (86–89).
Queen Al*Ith, the goddess character more highly evolved than BenAta, the man the Providers specify she marry in order to father a child,
communicates telepathically with humans and animals, thinks in terms
of “we,” and embodies the peace of her zone. They and Vahshi of Zone
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Five change as they become caught up in romantic love and sexuality
in performing their duties.
Although there is free travel back and forth between the zones, the
self-conscious creator-narrator, Lusik, uses the hatching, wall, and
transformation imagery also developed in Memoirs of a Survivor to
describe Al*Ith’s journey toward wisdom: she goes into “the deepest
regions of herself, with a knowledge born that she knew would hatch
out” as she gazes toward Zone Two (58–59). Later, her entrance is
described as a dreaming “or idea she had stumbled into,” and the
shapes there, “a race of people so rare and fine they could pass through
walls,” seem to come from old tales, songs, and stories and, significantly, can be brought to life by the storytellers. Although “she had
already gone beyond boundaries to be here at all,” she knows she
needs to return when she is better prepared so that she can penetrate
the barrier of her “thick clumsy substance” (194, 196–97). Near the
end of the novel, after years have passed, Al*Ith is separated from
husband, son, sister, and all the spirit-fathers and children she has
known. Older and apparently no longer beautiful, Al*Ith has changed
so much that she could pass through Zone Three without being recognized. She is confined to a shed near the border of Zones Two and
Three not only because Zone Three is no longer enough for her but
also because her growing awareness, a difference often misperceived
as monstrous, separates her from the other inhabitants. One day
when she visits Zone Two, she does not come back. Gradually, other
questers follow her path. Zone Two seems to represent what we all
know but have forgotten, what is suggested by old songs, children’s
counting games, riddles, and rituals, an awakeness people fear. As
is usual in mystical journeys, before Al*Ith can ascend to the blue
mists of Zone Two, she must descend to Zone Four, just as both BenAta and Vahshi must experience different zones to achieve balance.
Readers never clearly see Zone Two, and Zone Two is still not Zone
One, where, presumably, the Providers reside. The different zones are
spoken of as opposing mirrors and the marriages as a fusion of opposites.
This crone’s journey is also creative. Interrupting the narrative of
Al*Ith to speak to readers not as “I” but as “we,” the narrator, Lusik,
identifies himself as androgynous and suggests that Al*Ith and any of
them can be a storyteller or Chronicler: “We are the visible and evident
aspects of a whole we all share, that we all go to form. . . . I am . . .
what I am at the moment I am that . . .” (197–98). Thus, the story
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of Al*Ith is, for readers, simultaneously a visit to the zones (Fishburn
102), Al*Ith’s creation, Al*Ith herself, and a way to wisdom.
The nameless crone narrator of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, another transmuted storyteller, narrates her dystopian metafiction retrospectively from a mysterious position beyond the destruction
of her world. Possibly utopian, certainly not in any realm of realism,
this position establishes her as one who knows, possibly one who is
no longer human, as she looks back upon all she has learned about
the repressive past—hers, Emily’s, Lessing’s, Edwardian England’s,
and ours—about being human, and about the necessity to penetrate
barriers to the unconscious and a mythic knowledge beyond words.
In many respects, she lives in a “tower” similar to the one Kerewin
Holmes inhabits in The Bone People, a solitary literal and symbolic
window where, often accompanied by an animal helper, she can watch
the continuous breakdown and reconstruction of her world. When
this crone narrator penetrates the literal and symbolic wall to see an
androgynous “she” who cleans and begins to heal the world destroyed
by technology and violence, she joins in the cleansing and ordering and
ultimately seems to become that “she,” the cyclical goddess of vision
and wisdom who destroys in order to re-create. Perrakis suggests that
each of the characters in the book, which Lessing describes as an autobiography, represents a part of the narrator as well as of Lessing (42).
Thus, the flawed characters, including child criminals, transform and
become part of the whole.
The book ends with frequently overlooked creation and goddess
mythology suggesting a new beginning from a cracked iron egg (Wilson, “Cosmic Egg”). Evoking Greek creation myth from Hesiod’s
Theogyny, Lessing’s iron egg marks the end of the iron age of humanity
(Newman 4) and becomes the egg of creation from chaos and darkness.
The so-called ages of man include gold, silver, brass, hero demigods,
and iron ages; the iron egg suggests the annihilation of evil humanity
in the present (Hamilton 63, 69, 70). Paradoxically, however, as Morgan says, the egg can mean a cyclical return—I think a rebirth—of a
different golden age than the one Hesiod envisions, that of the Great
Goddess, who creates new world harmony. In Hamilton’s account of
the golden age, only men exist before Pandora, the first woman, comes
to release plagues on humankind (70). Earlier, however, Pandora was
part of the Great Goddess, possibly an underworld goddess associated
with Hecate (Leach and Fried 843), and, typical of the way that patriarchy reversed goddess myths, she may have released not plagues but
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benefits to humanity when she opened the box or jar. On an individual
as well as cultural level, Memoirs of a Survivor promises present and
future wisdom to those willing to follow their crone selves through the
walls of consciousness to integration.
Creating a new mythology and a new family in another apocalyptic
metafiction that marks a new beginning on several levels, in The Bone
People (1984) Hulme, like Atwood, Lessing, Morrison, Ferre, and
Erdrich, writes postcolonial metanarrative that embeds folklore and
crosses cultural and national boundaries. Like Atwood’s and Lessing’s
artist-narrators, Kerewin Holmes is initially divided and alienated,
partly because she is doubly colonized as a New Zealand Maori. Like
Memoirs’ watcher, Kerewin journeys from chaos and disorder, disease, and the end of the world to order, healing, rebirth, and a new
beginning that is, on different levels, the novel we read and a future
beyond what human beings can achieve now. Hulme even uses many of
the techniques, themes, and motifs Atwood and Lessing do, including
italicized special passages, cycles, spirals, hands, mirrors and a turnedaround mirror, the divided and alien self, survival, goddess images,
and the quest for home, order, and pattern. Like several Atwood characters, Kerewin feels as if Dracula or other vampires are draining her,
and, like, Oryx and Crake, this novel parodies and revisions canonical
intertexts, in this case Robinson Crusoe and “The Fisher King.” Like
Lessing’s Memoirs and Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and
Five, the self-conscious narrator seems androgynous and outside of
conformist society. The evolving female artist who paints, designs, and
builds clever objects such as her suneater as well as homes and meeting
halls, composes and plays music, and writes, Kerewin is a mythic goddess in both wrecked and reborn states. Drawing on the tower imagery of “Rapunzel” and other fairy tales and of such writers as Yeats,
Joyce, Peake, and Woolf, Hulme embeds fish, grail, crucifix, rosary,
phoenix, aikido, I-Ching, tarot, and tricephalos images in a text that
uses both English and Maori languages and opposes and then synthesizes Western and Maori religion, folklore, and literary traditions.
Kerewin is the kind of archetypal Rapunzel that Margaret Atwood
describes: an Ice Virgin–Hecate figure, symbolically imprisoned alone
in a tower that in this case classically symbolizes her alienation from
(rather than incorporation of) the attitudes of society. As is usual in
this archetype, she and her tower are one, and the “rescuer” is absent
(Survival 209–10). Although Atwood sees this Rapunzel syndrome as
characteristically Canadian, other cultures, especially colonized ones,
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illustrate the same kind of repressive conditioning that affects selfesteem and creates victims rather than heroes. Because she is not interested in sexual relationships and does not conform to notions of a
female as weak, demure, petite, emotional, passive, and “feminine,”
Kerewin actually sees herself as genderless, neuter rather than female,
and she wants to escape being either “mizzed or mistered” (47). She
is an artist rather than muse or tongueless, handless maiden, but a
“non-painting painter” who loses her art and, along with Joe, their
Maori selves in the way that they live (62). Certainly this knife-carrying, heavy, muscular “pirate,” whose face is eczema-scarred and who
has yellowed eyes, has never thought of herself as nature or as either
nurturing or mothering. She initially thinks of the child Simon, whom
she eventually adopts, as “it.” Her many valuable rings have nothing
to do with adorning herself to look attractive or performing as “feminine” in either the Maori or Pakeha cultures she straddles; and, like
her author, she rejects even a regular telephone to keep her in contact
with the outside world. Hulme seems to parody reader expectations
of female characters, novels, and gender roles deliberately. Because
Kerewin is not submissive to desire and not seducible, some readers
will think that she poses the traditional threat of the terrifying, castrating bitch (another crone role). Her beating of Joe certainly enforces
this view, and at the end she explicitly defies patriarchy by giving her
name to both Simon and Joe. Because the novel withholds a conventional “happy ending” and frustrates readers’ desires for a marriage
resolution to a plot about a woman, man, and child, some may dismiss
how radical Kerewin’s spiral journey and transformation are and how
postcolonial and feminist her crone wisdom is.
At the beginning of a spiral-shaped metafiction in which “The End
[Is] at the Beginning,” Kerewin, Joe, and Simon “are nothing more
than people, by themselves. . . . But all together, they have become the
heart and muscles and mind of something perilous and new, something strange and growing and great. Together, all together, they are
the instruments of change” (4). The crest of Simon’s ancient Irish
family is a phoenix, and all three characters are phoenixlike: they
undergo archetypal journeys from being broken, diseased, lost, lonely,
and internally and externally divided to being whole, well, found, and
part of the family of humankind. Although we do not know Kerewin’s
exact age, she is certainly not young, and if she is just “thirty odd” at
the novel’s beginning (24), she appears to age in magical time extending beyond the present into a utopian future: as the book proceeds
Chapter 3: Through the “Wall”
99
in what seems like a hundred-year transformation, she, like the other
main characters, experiences a symbolic death and rebirth, with both
Joe and Kerewin accomplishing this through their encounter with wise
ancestors.
Like nearly all of Atwood’s characters and most of Lessing’s, Kerewin
is split or internally divided as we first see her, alone in a bar and alone
in her tower, in an abyss and prison, cut off from her “ex-family” and
the Maori value of community that she had cherished because she
mistakenly believed “she was self-fulfilling, delighted with the pre-eminence of her art” (7). Again like Iris and Atwood’s many “handless”
characters initially unable to touch, to be touched, or to be subjected
to dismembering touch (Wilson, “Popular Culture”; Sexual Politics
136–228), Kerewin uses her still-poetic voice mostly to deconstruct
rather than create. Although she dreams of a spider shadow that could
indicate interconnectedness of all, her drawing initially refuses to come
out. Her interior monologue is rife with the voice of her wisecracking
but self-demeaning snark; in her “unjoy,” in her “haggard ashdead
world,” she hides a “screaming” painting behind her desk and thinks:
“You are nothing,” says Kerewin coldly. “You are nobody, and
will never be anything, anyone.”
And her inner voice, the snark, which comes into its own
during depressions like this, says,
And you have never been anything at anytime, remember?
And the next line is. . . .
I am worn, down to the raw nub of my soul. (91–92)
Near the end of the novel, however, after renouncing any control over
her life and journeying to her family’s original hut, Kerewin wakes
from her illness with stomach cancer to see “a thin wiry person of indeterminate age. Of indeterminate sex. Of indeterminate race”—a person
without accent, and the one who has healed her (424–25). Kerewin
stops at the family baches, dreams that she has diminished to bones,
desires home in a larger sense than ever before, begins rebuilding the
spiral Maori hall, and, writing what could be the story we read in her
journal, her Book of the Soul, she places it in its chest and sets fire to
both. Her story is phoenixlike, beginning from its ashes. Accompanied
by her eyeless cat, she knows without eyes: she has crone wisdom. Like
Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which finishes and begins as its writer
dies, and Lessing’s Memoirs, which “ends” with the re-creation of the
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world, Hulme’s mythic text and intertexts signify beginnings from endings and a new family of humanity.
If women writers and their female creators are monsters, they are
also healers who cause rebirth. Medusa crone narrators not only transcend paralysis and the monstrous to revision and reconstruct stories
demeaning to women: they also model women’s journeys through language into wisdom.
Note
1.A “cuckoo child,” as in Hulme’s poem “He Hoha” [What a Fuss], haunts
the aging persona and causes her to bleed inside. According to Fee, cuckoos “lay
their eggs in those of other, usually smaller birds; the chick hatches, pushes the
natural chicks out, and is fed by the coopted adoptive parents.” However, contrary to Fee’s view that Simon does not displace another child, it could be argued
that he does displace Joe’s birth child. Still, Simon performs a symbolic function:
he “ultimately returns Kerewin to her family and to her art” (Fee 59).
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Papers. Collection 335. “The Angel of Bad Judgment.” In
“The Blind Assassin” Manuscripts, 2001. Box 60. Thomas Fisher Rare Book
Library. University of Toronto Library, Toronto, Canada.
———. The Blind Assassin. Toronto: McClelland &Stewart, 2000.
———. Bodily Harm. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982.
———. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988.
———. “The Curse of Eve—Or, What I Learned in School.” Reprinted in Second Words: Selected Critical Prose, 215–28. Toronto: Anansi, 1982.
———. Good Bones. Toronto: Coach House, 1992.
———. Lady Oracle. New York: Avon, 1976.
———. Life Before Man. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.
———. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan Talese Doubleday, 2003.
———. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. New York: Canongate, 2005.
———. The Robber Bride. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993.
———. Selected Poems II. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.
———. Surfacing. New York: Popular Library, 1976.
———. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Toronto: Anansi,
1972.
Bogan, Louise. “Medusa.” In Norton Anthology: Literature by Women—The
Traditions in English, 2nd ed., ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar,
1569. New York: Norton, 1996.
Bryson, John. “Keri Hulme in Conversation with John Bryson.” Antipodes: A
North American Journal of Australian Literature 8.2 (Dec. 1994): 131–35.
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Carter, Angela. The Bloody Chamber and Other Adult Tales. New York: Harper
Colophon, 1981.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of
Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl,
347–62. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1997.
Cixous, Helene, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy
Wing. Theory and History of Literature 24. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1988.
Condé, Maryse. I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem. Trans. Richard Philcox. Foreword by Angela Y. Davis. New York: Ballantine, 1992.
Davey, Frank. “Atwood’s Gorgon Touch.” Reprinted in Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood, ed. Judith McCombs, 134–52. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988.
Fee, Margery. “Keri Hulme.” In International Literature in English: Essays on
the Major Writers, ed. Robert L. Ross, 53–62. New York: Garland, 1991.
Ferguson, Mary Ann, ed. Images of Women in Literature. 4th ed. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
Ferre, Rosario. The Youngest Doll (Papeles de Pandora). Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1991.
Fishburn, Katherine. The Unexpected Universe of Doris Lessing: A Study in
Narrative Technique. Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy 17. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985.
Freud, Sigmund. “Medusa’s Head.” In Collected Papers, ed. James Strachey,
5:105–6. London: Hogarth P, 1957.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. Norton Anthology: Literature by
Women—The Traditions in English. 2nd ed. New York: Norton, 1996.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. Amended and enlarged edition. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1948.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes. New York:
Meridian, 1969.
Harrison, Jane Ellen. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. London:
Merlin, 1980.
Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. New York: Penguin, 1973.
Ingersoll, Earl G., ed. Doris Lessing Conversations. Princeton, NJ: Ontario Review Press, 1994.
“Keri Hulme.” Contemporary Authors. 125: 209–15. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
Laurence, Margaret. The Stone Angel. Toronto: Bantam, 1981.
Leach, Maria, and Jerome Fried, eds. Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Dictionary
of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.
Lessing, Doris. “Address.” Tenth International Conference on the Fantastic in
the Arts. Dania, Florida, March 1989.
———. The Diaries of Jane Somers. New York: Vintage, 1984.
———. The Four-Gated City. New York: Bantam, 1970.
———. The Golden Notebook. New York: Bantam, 1981.
———. The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five. Canopus in Argos
Archives. New York: Knopf, 1980.
———. Martha Quest. New York: New American Library, 1964.
———. Memoirs of a Survivor. New York: Knopf, 1975.
———. The Summer Before the Dark. New York: Bantam, 1973.
Mailer, Norman. “The Time of Her Time.” In Ferguson, 285–306.
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Margaret Atwood: Once in August. Dir. Michael Rubbo. National Film Board
of Canada, 1984.
Morgan, Emily. “Iron Age Apocalypse, or Rebirth of a Goddess Golden Age?
Reading the Iron Egg in Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor.” M.A. paper,
University of Northern Colorado, Fall Semester 2005.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.
Newman, Robert D. “Doris Lessing’s Mythological Egg in The Memoirs of a
Survivor.” Notes on Contemporary Literature 14.3 (May 1984): 3–4.
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. “Journeys of the Spirit: The Older Woman in Doris Lessing’s Works.” Doris Lessing Studies 24, nos. 1 and 2 (Summer/Fall
2004): 39–43.
Pratt, Annis. Dancing with Goddesses: Archetypes, Poetry, and Empowerment.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five: Doris Lessing’s Alchemical Allegory.” In Critical Essays on Doris Lessing, ed.
Claire Sprague and Virginia Tiger, 60–68. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986.
Sarton, May. Headnotes for May Sarton. In Gilbert and Gubar, 1685–86.
———. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing. New York: Norton, 1965.
———. “The Muse as Medusa.” In Gilbert and Gubar, 1690–91.
———. The Reckoning. New York: Norton, 1978.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred. “Ulysses.” In The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Victorian Age, vol. 2B, 7th ed., ed. M. H. Abrams and Stephen
Greenblatt, 1213–14. New York: Norton, 2000.
Tomalin, Claire. “Watching the Angry and Destructive Hordes Go By.” In Ingersoll, 173–77.
Walker, Barbara G. Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1983.
Wilson, Sharon R. “The Cosmic Egg in Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor.”
Doris Lessing Studies 23, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 13–17.
———. “Magic Photographs in Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” In Recent Work
on Recent Atwood: Texts, Contexts, Intertexts, ed. Paul Martin and Theodore Sheckels. Forthcoming.
———. “Margaret Atwood and Popular Culture: The Blind Assassin and Other
Novels.” Journal of American and Comparative Culture 25, nos. 3–4 (December 2002): 270–75.
Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1993.
———. “Mythic Quests for Postcolonial Identity: Morrison’s Beloved.” Myths
and Fairy Tales in Contemporary Women’s Fiction. Book under consideration.
P art II
Margaret Atwood
Doubling Back Through the Labyrinth
C hapter 4
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure
E arl G. I ngersoll
Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize novel The Blind Assassin (2000)
represents the spiritual adventure of its narrator, Iris Chase Griffen,
as she struggles to complete her memoirs and the story of her family
“before it’s too late.” Iris has a heart, as an earlier generation would
have phrased it, along with an octogenarian’s body, sliding relentlessly
toward disintegration. Her old body would probably be less interesting
in this narrative, were it not for the fact that this body is the increasingly unreliable vehicle for getting the story itself told, because Iris is
almost the last person left who knows enough about what happened to
tell it. If Doris Lessing had not already entitled one of her novels Memoirs of a Survivor, Atwood might well have adopted that title, since
much of the pathos of this tragicomedy is the product of Iris’s having
survived all of her family, except for her estranged granddaughter with
whom she has had no contact in years. Thus The Blind Assassin is
flirting with a catastrophe in narration—the possibility that Iris’s aged
body could very well give out before she finishes telling the story. By
the double accounting of narrative, such a catastrophe is unlikely to
happen since readers have been led to believe in the First Law of FirstPerson Narration: the narrator will be alive at the end of the story.
Even so, Iris’s advanced age and heart condition create tension in this
narrative, especially as the end nears, and some readers might worry
that the narrative could simply stop, without an ending.
The narrative exposes a complex of tensions and anxieties in Iris
as the responsibilities of telling this story force her to go back over
elements of her family history and her own biography that are tremen105
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Part II: Margaret Atwood
dously painful and increasingly laden with guilt. Atwood clearly sets
her viewpoint character off on a variety of spiritual journeys in which
Iris will confront daunting challenges and pitfalls, with no guarantee
that she will achieve the state of grace readers might be expecting at
the end of such a journey of the human spirit. Because (like most of
us) Iris wants to believe in her own innocence as a child, she will have
to face the specter of at least contemplating vengeance on those who
exploited her vulnerability as a little girl and as a young woman. These
“memoirs” grant her the power to turn her enemies into villains whose
evil she now can paint in its darkest hues. Similarly, she confronts the
disabling trap of victimhood, of absolving herself of any agency in
the past, painting herself as “innocent” because she was powerless to
defend herself against those, such as her husband and sister-in-law, who
seem to have enjoyed having the power to cause her pain. And there is
the very large issue of her own sense of failure and guilt in treating others, even more vulnerable than she, with a cruelty mirroring the abuse
she suffered at the hands of others. Another novel whose title Atwood
might have borrowed is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, because one major
reason why Iris has undertaken the writing of these “memoirs” is an
impulse toward a variety of deathbed atoning, an attempt to set things
right by confessing her sins. If the reader who has become invested
in the dynamic of Iris’s inner life is impelled by a desire to finish her
story, that desire may be grounded in some concern that Iris might
give up the project, not only because the truth is so difficult to grasp
but also because this confession offers a self-portrait of a not entirely
“nice” individual who has some rather unpleasant things to reveal
about herself. Accordingly, these memoirs represent a spiritual journey
of immense proportions, the ascent of a steep mountain path strewn
with impulses toward revenge, delusions of victimhood, a cluster of
guilt feelings—any group of which might be sufficient to encourage
this aged pilgrim to sit down by the wayside in despair. Thus the very
fact that Iris finishes this spiritual journey represented by her narrative
is a testimony to Atwood’s faith in the possibility of such triumphs of
the spirit, especially in the old who have every right to refuse the call
to make such arduous journeys in their latter days.
In the context of fictional form, Iris’s premature death would be a
catastrophe of immense consequences for the story because Atwood
has framed the narrative as a variety of whodunit.1 As Peter Brooks
has theorized, the desire to know how a story ends generates the “narratable,” or what can be told as a story. That desire to know how the
Chapter 4: The Blind Assassin as Spiritual Adventure
107
narrative will end, according to Brooks, is the stimulus, rousing readers
from their state of quiescence as they begin reading.2 Pushing Brooks’s
thesis to the limit, desire in The Blind Assassin is generated out of
its mysterious opening sentence: “Ten days after the war ended, my
sister Laura drove a car off a bridge.” As narrator and writer of her
family’s history, Iris also functions as a variety of detective, leading
her readers toward a “truth” at the climax of the novel’s plot. Given
the notion of the déjà lu proposed by Roland Barthes,3 this text is
generated out of a prodigious history of the “already read,” or all
the texts of detection, stretching back to the beginning with Oedipus,
commonly credited with being the first detective in Western literature.
And narrative’s implication in desire is immediately apparent with the
mention of Oedipus and his associations with Freudian psychoanalysis,4 but also with one particular variety of the whodunit, established
in the Oedipus story, the narrative of the detective who discovers that
the criminal he is pursuing is ultimately himself. Accordingly, readers
are drawn toward the ending of The Blind Assassin to confirm their
suspicions that it was Iris, not her dead sister Laura, who wrote the
novel-within-a-novel “The Blind Assassin” and was therefore the lover
of Alex Thomas, with whom Laura was also in love. But most importantly those readers are impelled forward by a desire for the truth of
Iris’s complicity in the apparent suicide of her sister, announced in the
opening sentence.
Thus despite its vintage-Atwood moments of comedy, The Blind
Assassin offers a contemporary tragedy in which the narrator, Iris
Chase Griffen, is impelled to relate the story of her life in part as
expiation for the “crime” she will reveal at the end. Because the narrative does indeed offer the “memoirs of a survivor,” it ought not to be
surprising that those memoirs have their origins in what W. B. Yeats
so aptly troped as “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.”5 Iris
sets out on the spiritual adventure of writing her memoirs to explain
in part why, like Herman Melville’s Ishmael, she “alone survived”
the calamity of her family’s downfall. And yet because Iris is the one
“whodunit,” these memoirs are also inevitably implicated in her desire
for atonement,6 for that state of grace in which the sinner, if not the
“criminal,” feels he or she has expiated past sins or crimes.
Perhaps more than the “whodunit” model, the genre of memoir
offers a more appropriate paradigm for a journey of spiritual adventure for this older woman. Like the detective story, memoirs have
become increasingly contaminated with illicit desire, for one patent
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impulse of that genre is the expectation that the writer will eventually
lead readers out of the “living room,” and other public areas of the
writer’s history, and into the “bedroom,” with its erotic promise of
exposing the private(s).7 As a very old writer of “memoirs,” Iris also
excites expectations that she will reveal fugitive desires because having
survived virtually everyone, she has nothing to lose in telling all.
If anything, the revelations of the aging are all the more appealing because of our culture’s embarrassment with the old body. Thus
the spiritual journey of the aged—one thinks perhaps immediately of
Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”—is an even more powerful adventure
because of the inevitable reminders of bodily decay. Bodily decrepitude
produces not only the challenges of a physical being that has become
undependable to ferry the spirit abroad, as the Greeks envisioned it
being borne on the backs of dolphins, but also the frustrations with a
body whose potential odiousness seems guaranteed to encourage the
spirit to unmoor itself from a physical being, resulting at best in humor
and at worse in a sense of unbearable loathsomeness. One recalls
Yeats’s troping of his own elderly body as a “battered kettle” “tied to
me / As to a dog’s tail.”8 In a sense Atwood pioneers the representation
in Iris of the old female writer, setting out like Tennyson’s Ulysses on
one last adventure of the spirit, confronting what readers have learned
to expect more frequently in old male writers such as Yeats, the writer
forced to confront declining energy to make the words dance their
way across the page, questioning the sanity of attempting what may be
no longer possible, and despite it all defying the potential catastrophe
of the novelist for whom the end of her life may come before the end
of her narrative.9
It is not entirely a digression to note here that these concerns with
writing and the writer’s death are not unique to The Blind Assassin.
In her book of essays Negotiating with the Dead, Atwood devotes the
final chapter, or essay, to teasing out the implications of the book’s
title. To begin with, the “Dead” represent for the writer all those
Dead Authors with whose ghosts she must negotiate while writing, in
a context not so far afield from T. S. Eliot’s notion in “Tradition and
the Individual Talent,” or from the more recent notion of intertextuality, the weaving of texts in the context of the déjà lu, the already read.
Atwood generalizes that “all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps
all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with
mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to
bring something or someone back from the dead” (156). The “all” at
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109
the beginning of the excerpt above marks Atwood’s own emphasis, suggesting that this is a very strong statement of her belief as a storyteller.
Furthermore, she is concerned in this chapter with answering a central
question of “why should it be writing, over and beyond any other art
or medium, that should be linked so closely with anxiety about one’s
own personal, final extinction?” (158). It is hardly coincidence that
she was at work on the Cambridge lectures on which these essays were
based while she was also working on The Blind Assassin. And even
though she would likely be annoyed by my interjecting biographical
considerations here, it is difficult not to read some of Atwood’s own
growing concern with mortality in both Negotiating with the Dead
and The Blind Assassin.10
With the assumption that if she doesn’t laugh she will cry, Iris holds
up her deteriorating, increasingly unreliable body as a comic mask, or
perhaps more accurately as a mirror reflecting our culture’s sense of
horror and dark humor in confronting the very old body. In the first
scene of the novel’s “present,” Iris catalogs the menaces of her home,
beginning with the shower, where she must not drop the soap: “I’m
apprehensive of falling. Still, the body must be hosed down, to get the
smell of nocturnal darkness off the skin. I suspect myself of having an
odour I myself can no longer detect—a stink of stale flesh and clouded,
aging pee.” The stairs have become another challenge: “I have a horror
of tumbling down them—of breaking my neck, lying sprawled with
undergarments on display, then melting into a festering puddle” (35).
And her body, reflected in the eyes of the young, verges on the obscene:
her arm is “a brittle radius covered slackly with porridge and string,”
and her scalp is “the greyish pink of mice feet. If I ever get caught in
a high wind my hair will all blow off like dandelion fluff, leaving only
a tiny pockmarked nubbin of bald head” (37). The greatest threat,
however, is her doctor’s report of what she remembers was once called
having “a heart, as if healthy people didn’t have one” (42). Setting
aside for the time being the metaphoric implications of this “heart,”
it is the resulting dizzy spells, more than anything else, that warn her
of the possibility that death could be only seconds away. Once again
humor seems her last weapon to defend herself from spiritual death,
or despair, while waiting for the end: “Having long ago whispered I
want to die, I now realize that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and
sooner rather than later. No matter that I’ve changed my mind about
it” (42). To counter such “morbidity,” Iris shares her strategy for
dealing with the deterioration of her sphincters, having mapped her
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neighborhood’s toileting facilities—“so useful if you’re caught short”
(84). This, then, is the broken-down writing instrument through whom
the narrative has chosen to represent itself, an aging body beginning a
marathon race with “a heart” threatening to stop before her story has a
chance to end, or end with any sense of closure. Alternately, Iris tropes
the heart she relies on this way: “I think of my heart as my companion
on an endless forced march, the two of us roped together, unwilling
conspirators in some plot or tactic we’ve got no handle on” (83).
In a sense, then, Iris’s advanced age is central to her narrating and
to the narrative it produces. Given her “heart,” Iris could easily shortcircuit the reader’s desire for the end by revealing the “truth” of her
complicity in Laura’s suicide in the first chapter and with it end the
story quickly, while she still has a chance to. Like other writers, however, Iris knows that “the readiness is all,” that narrative takes on a life
of its own, and, as Peter Brooks has reminded us, plot must end only
after a sufficient time has elapsed and “the middle” has prepared readers for “the end.”11 And the “truth” is a good deal more complicated:
unlike the whodunit depending entirely on the simplistic notion that the
“truth” has a criminal’s name written on it, this narrative cannot begin
to reveal a truth, recalled and imagined by Iris, without persuading its
readers to believe that only a history of the Chase family, beginning at
least with Iris and Laura’s grandparents,12 can help in explaining why
Laura drove a car off a bridge. In addition, that sense of a long history,
reaching back to encompass the lives of her parents and grandparents,
undoubtedly exacerbates Iris’s sense of old age and bodily decrepitude,
almost as though she feels that she now bears the weight of the family’s
age, along with her own. Finally, since the “present” of the novel is
the year 1998, Iris’s sense of age and decrepitude is also exacerbated
by this fin-de-siècle atmosphere, produced by an awareness that the
century ushered in with the bright hopes of her grandparents is now
tottering toward its (millennial) end, as Iris struggles to complete a history of its dark and painful events.
As memoirist and family historian, Iris engages her readers through
her wit, her intelligence, but mainly her effort to be honest in revealing her moral failings as well as her awareness of the limits of her art.
As earlier indicated, Iris as a spiritual adventurer is hardly anyone’s
sweet and lovable old granny. Increasingly, her cruelty toward those
she loves—especially but not exclusively toward her sister Laura—and
her sins of omission reveal her immersion in the “fury and the mire of
human veins.”13 It is, however, Iris’s growing pessimism concerning the
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potential for her writing to make truth-claims that cannot keep readers
from suspecting the author’s own awareness of truth being always at
least in part the product of human imagination and the poetic reconstruction of the past, and that historiography is less science than art,
and accordingly like other texts it is inevitably implicated in “fiction.”
Indeed, the text tropes the body in terms of history. Iris reports:
“My bones have been aching again, as they often do in humid weather.
They ache like history: things long done with, that still reverberate as
pain” (56). Her own personal history survives in the form of a few
metonyms her survivors will dispose of in dark plastic bags, although
“any life is a rubbish dump even while it’s being lived.” These metonyms are offered like a small impressionist poem: “The nutcracker
shaped like an alligator, the lone mother-of-pearl cuff link, the tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth. The broken silver lighter, the saucerless cup, the cruet stand minus the vinegar. The scattered bones
of home, the rags, the relics. Shards washed ashore after shipwreck”
(57). For readers with an investment in writing, however, the real fascination lies in Iris’s revelations of the arduous effort to get the words
down on paper. She writes: “I’m not as swift as I was. My fingers are
stiff and clumsy, the pen wavers and rambles, it takes me a long time to
form the words. And yet I persist, hunched over as if sewing by moonlight” (43). We should also note that because she is more than eighty
years old, Iris has missed the technological revolution of word processing. A primitivist writer, Iris relies on a cheap ballpoint pen—threatening, like her heart, to run out on her—and a single hard copy, with all
the existential vulnerability such an artifact used to hold for writers
who could not easily make copies of a day’s textual production.14 Like
her wispy hair that, as she reports, a strong wind could blow away, the
manuscript she generates while sitting in her garden could vanish in a
sudden gale. At the same time, Iris’s textual production becomes a trope
for the web her narrative spins, as though her being were flowing, as she
describes it, down her arm and through her finger, onto the blank page
before her—a concretizing of Hélène Cixous’s injunction to women
that they ought to “write through their bodies and fluids” (290).15
Like the delegating of the narration to Iris, this focus on textual
production enhances the novel’s self-reflexivity, as readers are encouraged to visualize the text being generated right before their eyes. The
notion of writing with the body16 is closely related to Iris’s concern
with an even larger challenge to writing than the lack of the strength
and dexterity required by the physical act. That concern is with yet
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another source of potential despair for the writer—the virtual impossibility of telling the truth. Iris begins with the assumption that she has
no audience in mind for this text, not even herself, since she may not
be fortunate enough to complete the story, much less read it if she does.
“Perhaps I write for no one,” she proposes. In her eyes, that would be
the best of all possible worlds, and it is crucial that we note this aspiration at the outset17 because, as we suspect, it is an ideal her narrative
will ultimately fail to achieve. However, this is her statement of the
ideal:
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set
down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by
yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself.
You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from
the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand
erasing it.
Impossible, of course.
I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I’m spinning across the page. (283)
Few passages are so central to this narrative. This passage establishes a
kind of absurdist, self-destructing line of reasoning, reminiscent of the
Greek Stoic philosopher Zeno’s famous self-defeating logical mechanisms.18 A text can represent the truth only if its author erases with
the left hand what she has just written with her right, thus obliterating the text to preserve its truth or “destroying the text to save it.”
For us weaker mortals who cannot conceive of an art that must be
immediately destroyed, a web to be unraveled as it is woven—like the
shroud Penelope19 weaves each day for her father-in-law, Laertes, only
to unravel it each night—the only alternative is to bear the text’s inevitable contamination by the “fury and the mire of the human heart”
impelling writers to ensnare their readers, including themselves, in the
“fiction,” the “excusing yourself” for the writer’s humanness.
In this way The Blind Assassin seems intent on problematizing the
notion of “the truth” as the immediately preceding novel, Alias Grace,
also did with its subversion of the whodunit. Readers of the earlier
novel who were familiar with the subtle, “poetic” narrative Atwood
crafted in, say, The Handmaid’s Tale, also rendering the conventional
notion of the ending problematic, were unlikely to have much faith
that Grace was apt to reveal herself as a guilty accomplice to murder
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near the end of the story she was narrating. As I have argued,20 Alias
Grace subverts the whodunit’s simplistic confidence that guilt can be
so easily ascertained, or that those involved in crimes, if anyone, ought
to know the extent of their guilt. Like Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin
offers a narrative being generated by a participant in the events represented, acknowledging that memoir, like historiography, is a reconstruction and not some precise and accurate snapshot of “the truth.”
Thus, in a sort of parody of the denied expectations of readers, as she
is nearing the end of The Blind Assassin, Iris will reveal that it was she
“whodunit,” and yet, as she has prepared “her” readers to expect, this
narrative has been (inevitably) a web in which she has been excusing
herself to the (single) reader for whom it has been generated, her granddaughter Sabrina, the (sole) heiress of the Chase and Griffen families
and, probably more importantly, the heiress of the next century and
millennium. Once again, following this pastiche of Zeno’s logic, if this
text has not been erased by its writer, it is inevitably implicated in “fiction” or “excusing yourself.”
And Iris has her work cut out for her if this family history is to be,
in part at least, an apologia pro vita sua. As it becomes readily apparent, Iris is bent less on “telling the truth” than on explaining herself to
the last member of the family whose good opinion she cares about—
her granddaughter Sabrina. Like another aging novelist, Briony Tallis
in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, Iris is motivated to explain, and
excuse, her role in what amounts to the destruction of her own sister.
It becomes important to begin her explanation by moving back to
the generation of her grandparents for a variety of reasons. First, Iris
wants to affirm that the Chases represent an “old family,” in contrast
to the hated and hateful Griffens whom she enjoys hearing dismissed
at a social gathering as “arrivistes.” Grandfather Chase may have
made the family fortune in something as mundane as buttons, but he
had the social good sense to marry into a family more established than
his own, an expression of the hypergamy, or marrying up the social
ladder, common in the nineteenth century as entrepreneurs often married the daughters of their social “betters.” Iris’s father took over the
button business when he returned, battered, from the killing fields of
the Great War his two brothers did not survive. A hollow man in the
wasteland the war produced, Chase eventually lost the family fortune
in his quixotic efforts to look after the interests of his workers in a
world of depression and, more crucially, a world of change, in which
buttons became not just mundane but unprofitable. Like her sister
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Laura in a more dramatic manner, Iris depicts herself as a victim of her
family fortunes and her society’s construction of her as a woman in a
patriarchal, increasingly fascist world.
Iris explains herself thus as a poor little rich girl, bred to be a society lady and therefore denied a meaningful education, her youth being
merely an apprenticeship of patiently waiting for a man to choose her
to dance with him through marriage and motherhood. Although the
analogy is not evident on the novel’s surface, Iris cannot have been
unaware of Laura’s and her resemblance on a minor scale to the “Little
Princesses,” one of whom was in training to become queen of the British Empire while the other waited as potential substitute. Because Mrs.
Chase died of a miscarriage when the girls were young—perhaps this
lost child was to be the son and heir who would manage the buttonmaking, and later society’s underwear as well—it was the girls’ nanny,
Reenie, who raised them. Like many traditional servants, Reenie is
more socially conscious than her betters, and she schools Iris, in particular, in the necessity of always living according to the expectations
of the townsfolk in Port Ticonderoga. A marvelous example of that
schooling is demonstrated in the issues of how to dress for the annual
picnic sponsored by the Chases, who invite literally the whole town to
the celebration. The girls must not dress too well, for that would be
seen as arrogant, especially during the Depression; however, they also
could not dress too casually, for that would show contempt for the
limited means of the townsfolk.
Because of her status Iris must not only dress for her social inferiors; she must also acknowledge that she has no real “identity” but
is essentially a social construction, a text on which others may write
their desire. And since hers is a patriarchal society, it goes without
saying that all the “writers” are men. She is Daddy’s little girl until
Chase fails in business. Because it is impossible for him to be cruel to
his workers by laying them off, he struggles to be kind by saving as
many jobs as possible and eventually makes it unprofitable to employ
any of them. This business failure feminizes him by making him powerless and therefore vulnerable, and he is forced to throw himself on
the mercy of his largest business competitor, Richard Griffen. Or to be
more accurate, Chase throws his daughter Iris to these wolves, not only
the macho, fascist Richard but also his sister Winifred, modeled on
the Wicked Witch of the West. Mr. Chase tells Iris that he and Griffen
have talked about the prospective “merger,” and although he would
not force her to marry a man she chose not to, he is compelled to add
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that if she demurs he will no longer have the means to maintain the
status of either of his daughters as “ladies.” Trained to be a traditional
woman who says, “Do whatever you will with me,” Iris at eighteen
agrees to marry a man old enough to be her father and submits for
years to his virtual rape in the marriage bed. It is crucial that the Iris
who has been trained to dumb down her potential to think logically
fails to put two and two together. Her father takes his own life when
her husband betrays the “gentleman’s agreement” to spare the Chase
workers in a merger—the agreement for which Iris’s body was the
down payment—and she learns on returning from Europe that her
husband tore up all of Reenie’s telegrams with the news of her father’s
death so the honeymoon would not be spoiled for her. Furthermore,
she bears Griffen’s sadistic sexual assaults, knowing his pleasure grows
with his awareness that she feels nothing for him sexually, and yet she
apparently fails to see that her husband, the crafty capitalist, has told
her sister Laura in so many words: “Let’s make a deal! You submit to
my raping you, and I will not reveal the whereabouts of your lover-boy,
Alex Thomas.”
Iris Chase is not, of course, the first victim in Atwood’s fiction.
One sister in victimage who comes to mind immediately is Offred
in The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood’s dystopian vision of an American
theocracy and patriarchy, in which “handmaids” could be coerced
into becoming walking wombs for those in power who have lost their
fertility through radioactive contamination. Like Iris, Offred takes a
lover and produces a child, since her Commander could not. Iris is also
reminiscent of Elaine Risley in Cat’s Eye, who submits to being tortured psychologically as well as physically by her preteen girlfriends,
apparently because she feels she must have done something wrong to
attract such sadistic treatment. In one of that novel’s most memorable
images, Elaine begins flaying herself alive, so to speak, by peeling the
skin off her feet. Her loving mother seems powerless to stop the abuse
of her daughter, even though she suspects something horrible is taking place. There persists in Atwood’s writing the notion that evil will
go on as long as good people fail to speak out against it. At the same
time, Elaine is an important “sister” of Iris because, as even Elaine herself acknowledges, she develops a “mean mouth” as a young woman,
almost as though her perception of earlier victimage authorizes verbal
cruelty toward others. And finally, although Elaine as an adult voices
a lack of anger and resentment toward her prime tormentor, Cordelia,
it is open to question whether she forgives Cordelia or secretly hopes
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that her childhood tormentor will roast in hell for eternity. Elaine is a
graphic artist, rather than a writer, and yet her “texts” frequently are
the products of that anger of the former victim, as she skewers women
such as Mrs. Smeath, whom she once overheard acknowledging that
Elaine was being tortured but deserved it. And these sisters in victimage point up the challenge for Iris in making her journey of the spirit
toward transcendence: how to shed the victim’s crutch as well as the
impulse to see one’s story as a revenger’s tragedy. Certainly, Iris is a
victim with more than sufficient grounds to call down vengeance on
her victimizers; unless she can rise above those subject positions of victim and revenging fury, however, she may never reach the peak toward
which her spiritual journey is aimed.
The issues of victimization in The Blind Assassin raise questions
concerning “sacrifice” in Iris’s narrative. One beginning of this theme
is her father’s embitterment by the slaughterhouse of the Great War in
which the idealism of young men was betrayed by the Old Gang of economic leaders, like Richard Griffen, squabbling over markets for their
products, cheap labor, and economic hegemony, and all of it gilded
over with the cant of a “place in the sun” and “saving civilization
from the barbarians.” In the wasteland of smashed ideals following the
war, Chase dedicates himself to a latter-day noblesse oblige, ultimately
turning his misguided notions of self-sacrifice into the destruction of
the very workers for whom he thought he was making that sacrifice.
His suicide ought to have offered his daughters a huge object lesson in
the futility of “sacrifice.”
In the end, however, both Laura and Iris are their father’s daughters. Iris depicts Laura as a pathetic, even inane, believer in the high
ideals of self-sacrifice. As a child Laura almost drowns herself in a misguided bargain in which she offers up her life for the return of her dead
mother from the beyond. Similarly, Laura naïvely believes that she can
protect Alex Thomas by submitting to Richard’s sexual advances, even
though, as Callista Fitzsimmons later suggests, Richard probably had
no idea where Alex was hiding (503). After all, Richard is apparently
not bright enough to figure out that his wife is having an affair and
that Aimee may not be his own child, even though his more suspicious sister comments on how dark the baby’s hair is—unlike the hair
of the Chases and Griffens but very much like Alex’s. Laura’s childish commitment to sacrifice—making bargains with God and Richard
Griffen—deflects attention, however, from the fact that Iris is, more
importantly, her father’s daughter.
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Much of Iris’s sense of victimage is implicit in her preoccupation
with sacrifice. She wants very much to justify her willingness to marry
Richard as an attempt to rescue the family fortunes. Accordingly, when
she learns of her father’s suicide, resulting from Richard’s betrayal
of the deal in which he bought her—at barely eighteen she was a
“steal”—Iris thinks: “I’d married Richard for nothing, then—I hadn’t
saved the factories, and I certainly hadn’t saved Father. But there was
Laura, still; she wasn’t out on the street” (314). (Even the circumstances of Mr. Chase’s death entail a sacrifice of the truth, however,
for the suicide has to be concealed, or else Laura would get nothing
from her father’s life insurance policy.) What Iris ignores, of course, is
that Laura may be even less safe off the street and in the Griffen home
or, as it turns out, on the Water Nixie where he first rapes her. How
culpable is Iris for not suspecting Richard’s designs on Laura? How
culpable are we as readers for not figuring it out before Iris reveals the
truth? Or is this surprise yet another bit of evidence that Iris is feeding
us a line, or weaving a web, to snare her readers into acknowledging
the difficulty of foreseeing the evil of the Richards of this world? To
what degree was Iris unable to see Richard’s perverse interest in Laura
because of her own involvement with Alex Thomas? On at least one
occasion, Iris indicates an awareness of Richard’s infidelity but chooses
to compartmentalize his vagrancy as the conventional sexual exploitation of secretaries by their bosses. Once again in the context of her
journey of the spirit, how successful has Iris been in resisting the role
of victim licensed by the cruelty of others and turning them into villains
on whom she can call down the vengeance of the memoir writer?
The theme of sacrifice plays into Iris’s predilection for tragedy,
especially Shakespeare’s later tragedies in which the innocent are often
swept up in the bloodshed along with the evil. The staging of Richard’s
suicide offers a pastiche of Macbeth, the defeat of an ambitious tyrant’s
pursuit of political power, in this case, through the publication of
Laura’s fantasy novel, “The Blind Assassin,” to embarrass him socially.
In a moment it becomes apparent that Iris’s incredible performance
of the role of a Patient Griselda from medieval lore has been her living out the cynical wisdom of the street that smart people “don’t get
angry, they get even.” But what are we to make of the revelation of
her culpability in Laura’s suicide? Like the evil stepmother Winifred,
Richard plays out the fairy-tale role of a Bluebeard who is not content
to marry a woman young enough to be his daughter but must also rape
her even younger sister in a reworking of King Tereus and Philomela
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from Greek mythology.21 However, even as the Greek myth suggests,
Laura plays the role of God’s fool, the innocent, whom Iris seems to
carelessly destroy.
As I have argued in Studies in the Novel, one aspect of sacrifice in
The Blind Assassin is its textual implication in “memorials” on several levels. Returning from the graveyard of ideals in Europe, Captain
Chase is intent on defeating the Big Lie that the obscene destruction of
young lives had any noble purpose. As a result, his struggle with the
townsfolk over the war memorial defines this narrative’s immersion
in “memoirs” and other vehicles for memorializing the past. The war
memorial also foregrounds this memorializing of “sacrifice” as a Chase
legacy so that the Iris who is working through her past in these memoirs is her father’s daughter. The narrative contains another memorial,
this one to a Colonel Parkman, offering Iris the opening to suggest that
who or what is being memorialized is only a reconstruction, since in
this case no one knows what Parkman looked like. These monuments
or memorials to those who have been lost in history’s organized violence establish a context within which Iris will reconstruct the past, in
the novel we hold in our hands, as a monument to her family’s and her
own tragedy.
This theme of reconstruction, stretching back at least to The
Handmaid’s Tale, grounds Atwood’s sense of memoirs, or art itself, as
always a reconstruction of the past for the conscious, and unconscious,
purposes of the one who is doing the reconstructing. Once again this
narrative could, like Lessing’s novel, be called “Memoirs of a Survivor,” because as the sole survivor of the older generations of the tragic
Chase family, Iris is writing “history” to serve her own purposes. Iris
has a counterpart in Briony Tallis of Atonement, Ian McEwan’s uncannily similar tale. Briony is yet another novelist/narrator who speaks of
how the artist plays God in reconstructing the past to serve a higher
aesthetic, if not moral, purpose. Like Briony, Iris gives us the impression that members of her family, but especially Laura, represent the
raw material for her art, and, as we have seen, writing can aspire to
“truth” only when it is immediately erased. Although Iris is less blunt
in celebrating the power of her text to establish the only “truth” to
survive, she would subscribe to Briony’s rather cavalier dismissal of the
“real lives” of those she has survived when she asserts that “we will
only exist in my inventions” (Atonement 350).
In a sense Iris is telling this story as a consolation for being unable
to be a graphic artist. From its beginning this narrative has focused on
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a single photographic image—Alex and Iris in love, Laura with only
her hand stretching into the frame of the photograph. As Iris reveals,
she wrote the novel-within-the-novel, another story called “The Blind
Assassin,” as a memorial to Alex. She wrote the story because she could
not recover the happiness of the Eden in the photograph, representing
in its simple and unpretentious way what she aimed at preserving once
she discovered Alex was forever lost to her. She writes: “The picture is
of happiness, the story is not. Happiness is a garden walled with glass:
there’s no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there
are no journeys. It’s loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive
the story forward, along its twisted road” (518). In this way the story
reaches out to embrace, perhaps even to precipitate, the suffering that
makes stories possible. Were it possible for us to enter the glass-walled
garden of the photograph, there would no longer be any need for
stories. We would have reached the blessed still-point where journeys
end.
At the same time, this story is that glass-walled garden into which
Iris has allowed her readers to peer. From the outset readers have noted
the implications of the name of this “Iris” who is an “eye” as well as
an “I.” In the act setting the story in motion, Laura may be troped as
having passed through the looking glass with Iris’s self-revelation that
she, not Laura, had been Alex’s beloved. Tragic art demands just such
sacrifices, it would seem. Iris lived out her own life as a survivor in the
wasteland of a world from which love had been eradicated. The drunkenness, the sexual promiscuity, the empty days—all are part of her
tragic gesture of sacrifice to what had vanished with Alex’s death, and
then Laura’s. In the closing pages Iris herself is about to pass through
the glass she has spent a lifetime looking at and attempting to penetrate
with envy and longing.22
The circumstances of her dying are central to Atwood’s very earthly
construction of spiritual adventure. It bears repeating that Iris is a
pioneer in embodying the challenge of making art as an old woman,
struggling against the recognition of the muck with which the human
heart is filled—a dark recognition of hatred and spite and grief and
despair with the power to paralyze a weaker spirit that could barely
glimpse the promised land of a journey’s end with its promise of rest
for a decrepit body and a troubled soul. It is appropriate to her unwillingness to idealize this defining moment of her spiritual journey that
Iris notes, “The end, a warm safe haven,” but she adds that in the distance is a “postwar motel, where no questions are asked and none of
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the names in the front-desk register are real and it’s cash in advance.”
She invokes the Furies in a particularly modern sense of heroic effort:
“Guide my shaking arthritic fingers, my tacky black ballpoint pen;
keep my leaking heart afloat for just a few more days, until I can set
things in order.” Then implicating herself in the answer to the question, Who is the Blind Assassin?23 Iris confesses that in the beginning
she “wanted only justice. I thought my heart was pure,” but eventually
she recognized the appropriateness of justice being troped as a woman
blindfolded with a sword, “a pretty good recipe for cutting yourself”
(497), and others, we might add, since the novel Iris has been writing is
her Atonement, or “confession,” in the service of her desire for forgiveness.
The passage from which the citations above have been excerpted
has the imagistic density of poetry, and one more citation must be
made before moving to the closing scene of the novel, as Iris’s storytelling and her life end with an eerie sense of synchronicity. Iris invokes
her spiritual mother, Reenie, who often taught her an everyday philosophical truism: “All things have their place,” a statement that “in a
fouler mood” Reenie troped as “No flowers without shit” on her way
to justifying the darker side of the human heart she had exposed. “A
well-wrought invocation to the Furies can come in handy, in case of
need. When it’s primarily a question of revenge” (497). Important as
this confession of revenge may be, it is the qualifier “well-wrought”
that ought to signal yet another provenance for the tragedy called The
Blind Assassin—John Donne’s poem “The Canonization,” in which
the persona posits the efficacy of the sonnet to hold mighty truths, “As
well a well-wrought urn becomes / The greatest ashes, as half-acre
tombs.”24 Clearly, Iris has been fashioning this narrative as the “urn”
containing not only her family’s remains but her own as well. In the
end the Donne poem signals Iris’s accommodation of the sacred with
the profane, the spirit’s journey toward transcendence with the “fury
and the mire of human veins,” or, as Reenie so inelegantly suggested,
No flowers without shit.
That accommodation of the sacred and the profane is grounded
in the narrator’s death scene in spring—the narration almost without
our awareness having completed a year’s cycle from its beginning with
a school commencement ceremony. It is a warm, rainy evening, with
Iris sitting in her garden, enjoying the wild phlox in bloom, or what
she believes may be phlox, since she can no longer see very well. She is
awash in the odor of “moist dirt and fresh growth,” and she adds: “It
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smells like youth; it smells like heartbreak” (520). Unlike others perhaps on the threshold of death, Iris appears not to have severed the ties
with the living who expose the heart to pain, for she ends with a vision
of her heart’s desire—Sabrina appearing at the last moment and offering not love or forgiveness but only the ear of a listener. In the end Iris
needs only the atonement of art, the simplest form of which may be the
duo of a storyteller and her listener. It is left to the novel’s readers in
the world outside this glass-walled garden to reassure themselves that
Sabrina may have fulfilled her grandmother’s wish, for someone has
to have gathered up “this jumbled mound of paper” beside Iris’s dead
body and overseen its publication as the book we readers hold in our
own hands. The death notice indicates that Sabrina “has just returned
from abroad and is expected to visit this town shortly to see to her
grandmother’s affairs” (519). The contaminated but ultimately heroic
spirit of Iris has arrived at journey’s end and demonstrated the author’s
pioneering efforts at confirming the possibility of the older woman’s
pursuit of spiritual transcendence.25
This is, however, no immaculate and high-flown spiritual adventure
that Iris has been involved in. It reeks of the rank aroma of wild phlox
and the mire sustaining those flowers. It is a triumph of the spirit contaminated with the painful desire of remembered youth and the impatience with pretense and hypocrisy of those who, like Iris, are packing
the hope chest of their futures with the few memorials to their having
been briefly in this world as they ready themselves for a beyond in
which their crimes and misdemeanors may be understood and perhaps
even forgiven. As indicated earlier, “Atonement” might have served
Atwood’s purposes well as a title for this spiritual journey. Increasingly, Iris seems to be writing these “memoirs” for her granddaughter,
reaching out from the beyond to seek understanding and perhaps even
forgiveness for her failures, if not her sins. Within the logical framework of a text Iris apparently left in handwritten manuscript, the very
fact of the text’s existence as a book in print would argue that someone
found the manuscript and directed the process of its publication. Is it
sentimental to grasp at the possibility that it was Sabrina who chose
to preserve this record of her family history, this testament of faith Iris
created as her final voyage out, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, acknowledging
the obstacles and resisting the comforts of old age’s reduced expectations and choosing to make this last heroic gesture toward understanding and trust in the compassion of others? Perhaps the old, if anyone,
have a right to be sentimental.
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Notes
1.As I have argued in my essay “Engendering Metafiction: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” Atwood has had an interest in the whodunit at least since
Alias Grace, in which she subverts that genre’s easy confidence that the truth
can be established within a framework built on the elimination of “reasonable
doubt.”
2. See Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative.
3. See Roland Barthes’s S/Z.
4. Freud’s familiarity with the Sherlock Holmes stories is well known.
The implication of Freudian psychoanalysis in the detective story is apparent in
Nicholas Meyer’s fantasy novel and film, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, in which
Watson tricks Holmes into traveling to Vienna to be cured of his cocaine addiction by Sigmund Freud, who adopts Holmes’s method of detection for his own
work in tracking the origins of neuroses in his analysands’ life stories as part of
the “talking cure.”
5.At the end of his last major poem, “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.”
6. While working on Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2002), I was excited
by similarities between that novel and The Blind Assassin: both have very old
female novelists attempting to achieve atonement through the writing of family
memoirs in which they reveal how they destroyed a sister’s possibility for love.
Then I discovered that John Updike had “scooped” me in his excellent review of
Atonement.
7. See Peter Brooks’s provocative discussion of the novel and privacy in
Body Works.
8.In the poem “The Tower.” Elsewhere, the older Yeats tropes the body as
a “tattered coat upon a stick” (“Sailing to Byzantium”) or “a comfortable kind
of old scarecrow” (“Among School Children”).
9.Atwood may have thought about the instance of her “foremother,” Virginia Woolf, dying before she had completed the revisions of her posthumously
published novel, Between the Acts. While working on The Blind Assassin, Atwood would have been just about the age that Woolf was when she left Between
the Acts uncompleted.
10.Although she eschews “theory,” Atwood might support the notion of the
Death of the Author in the limited sense that the Author exists only during the
writing of a particular text and “dies” with its completion, as Iris literally does in
this novel. The second chapter of Negotiating with the Dead contains Atwood’s
provocative troping of the Author as the doubles Jekyll and Hyde, Jekyll being
the Author who signs books and grants interviews, while Hyde, on the other side
of the looking glass, to mix metaphors, is the Author writing. Or, to be more
precise, the site of writing is the looking glass itself, the narrow space that Jekyll
and Hyde jointly occupy during composition.
11.Roberta Rubenstein has commented that “Atwood is a fiendishly clever
manipulator of the reader’s knowledge” (234).
12.A fascinating analog for Iris’s/Atwood’s decision to begin the novel she is
narrating with the grandparents’ generation is offered by D. H. Lawrence’s two
greatest novels. Lawrence had written a draft for the novel eventually to become
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Women in Love when he decided that his protagonist, Ursula Brangwen, needed
a “past” before she settled with Rupert Birkin as her life partner. He wrote a
draft of the youth of Ursula’s parents and, still unsatisfied, drafted the story of
Ursula’s maternal grandparents, producing The Rainbow, the long “prequel” to
the novel he originally planned, developing the “present,” before Ursula meets
Birkin. Starting with the grandparents makes good sense psychologically, since
most of us have at best dim memories of great-grandparents.
13.Yeats in “Byzantium.”
14. The classic example of the manuscript’s vulnerability occurs in Henrik
Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler. After her former lover Lövborg leaves with her his
manuscript describing his vision of how civilization might be transformed, Hedda stuffs it into the stove and Lövborg takes his own life.
15.Iris seems to literalize writing with the body when she indicates an unwillingness to have a “woman” come in to do her laundry: “All those tatters,
those crumpled fragments, like shed white skins. Though not entirely white. A
testament to something: blank pages my body’s been scrawling on, leaving its
cryptic evidence as it slowly but surely turns itself inside out” (367–68).
16.It must be added here that the body also represents a “text” in Iris’s
narrative, as she later reveals that Richard’s sexual practices include deliberately
bruising her body in areas publicly covered with clothing, as though he were
marking it as a territory like a conquistador laying claim to new territories for
his possession.
17.Ironically, “at the outset” belies the fact that this passage occurs late in
the text, after Iris apparently has recognized the lack of “truth” in her text.
18. One of Zeno’s most famous paradoxes involved the impossibility of a
runner #1 overtaking runner #2 because #1 would always be able to cover no
more than a fraction of the distance separating him from #2.
19. Since this essay was first drafted, Atwood has published The Penelopiad:
The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus.
20. See my “Engendering Metafiction.”
21. See Sharon Wilson’s excellent study of Atwood’s use of fairy-tale motifs.
22. This looking-glass trope has its origins in Atwood’s provocative metaphorizing of the relationship between the halves of the Jekyll/Hyde figure of the
Author. As indicated above, the essence of the composing process is the narrow
space of glass in which Jekyll, the public Author, meets Hyde, the composing
Author, during the composition process.
23.Reviewers of the novel have leapt into the breach opened by Atwood’s
figure of the Blind Assassin. Barbara Mujica speculates that the Blind Assassin is
time, which ends up doing everyone in, the good as well as the evil.
24.It is hardly a coincidence that the renowned New Critic Cleanth Brooks
analyzed the John Donne poem in a classic example of “close reading” in his
book The Well-Wrought Urn. Furthermore, in Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake,
the viewpoint character Jimmy/Snowman mentions Donne (167). Because Jimmy
was an English major, his consciousness is full of literary allusions: he thinks, for
example, of “gods cavorting with willing nymphs on some golden-age Grecian
frieze” (169). Keats may not have invented the modifier “Grecian”; however, for
most readers it has become associated with Ode on a Grecian Urn.
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25.Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake offers yet another performance of the
aging, disintegrating viewpoint character as one of the last (if not the last) human beings in a futuristic world populated by genetically engineered humanoid
beings. This character Jimmy/Abominable Snowman is a former English major
turned advertising man, deprived of Iris’s gratification in writing her “memoirs
of a survivor” by the cruel reality of the children of Crake who will inherit the
earth being unable to read.
Works Cited
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
———. The Blind Assassin. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
———. Negotiating with the Dead. New York: Cambridge UP, 2002.
———. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003.
———. The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005.
Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1974.
Brooks, Cleanth. The Well-Wrought Urn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947.
Brooks, Peter. Body Works: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1993.
———. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. 1984. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992.
Cixous, Helene. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In The Signs Reader: Women,
Gender & Scholarship, ed. Elizabeth Abel and Emily K. Abel, 279–97. Chicago: U Chicago P, 1983
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. Vol. 1. Ed. E. K. Chambers. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896.
Ibsen, Henrik. Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House. 1891. Trans. Christopher
Hampton. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.
Ingersoll, Earl G. “Engendering Metafiction: Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace.”
American Review of Canadian Studies 31, no. 3 (2001): 385–401.
———. “Waiting for the End: Closure in Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.” Studies in the Novel 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 542–58.
Lawrence, D. H. The Rainbow. 1915. Ed. Mark Kinkead-Weekes. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1989.
———. Women in Love. 1920. Ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John
Worthen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
McEwan, Ian. Atonement. New York: Doubleday, 2002.
Meyer, Nicholas. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. New York: Dutton, 1974.
Mujica, Barbara. “The Blind Assassin.” Americas 53 (January 2001): 61.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “A Tale Told and Untold.” World and I 16 (January 2001):
234–43.
Updike, John. “Flesh on Flesh: A Semi-Austenesque Novel from Ian McEwan.”
New Yorker 78 (March 4, 2002): 80.
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Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson:
UP of Mississippi, 1993.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. New York: University Publications,
1983.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Ed. Richard J. Finneran. New
York: Collier, 1989.
C hapter 5
“And They Went to Bury Her”
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
and The Robber Bride
D ebrah R aschke
A nd
S arah A ppleton
At the end of Cat’s Eye, protagonist Elaine characterizes the old women
she admires on the plane “laughing like on gravel” as women who are
“amazingly carefree”: “They’re rambunctious, they’re full of beans;
they’re tough as thirteen, they’re innocent and dirty, they don’t give a
hoot. Responsibilities have fall away from them, obligations, old hates,
and grievances; now for a short while they can play again like children,
but this time without the pain” (444–45). Yet Atwood’s aging female
characters are often those who have not yet learned how to disengage
themselves from pain; they undergo late-life quests into the past to
encounter the anguish that has inhibited their growth. Atwood’s aging
female characters are often engaged in pivotal searches for identity
that necessitate a retrospective evaluation, one that invariably proffers
an inner adventure. Yet the ultimate “answers” are not always positive or affirming. Iris in The Blind Assassin reinterprets and perhaps
even reinvents the past. She subverts her pain by denying its source
and mitigating her own complicity. In contrast, in The Robber Bride,
the quest belongs not to the bad girl but to those who confront her,
including the reader.
Atwood’s writing has always reflected the allure of the bad girl. This
bad girl, as many have noted, cannot be easily exorcized to some noman’s-land where her influence becomes contained and minimized. She
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is a constant presence, inseparable from us, like the dove in Coleridge’s
“Christabel” whose breath becomes indistinguishable from the breath
of the snake that has coiled around its neck. She cannot, as Charis suggests of Zenia in The Robber Bride, “be meditated out of existence”
(75). Karen Stein, in her analysis of Zenia, notes: “When she is supposedly dead, she returns to life again. When she is cremated for the
(seemingly) second time, the jar containing her ashes cracks as it is
being thrown into the water” (99). Extending Zenia’s otherness to a
global perspective, Coral Ann Howells sees Zenia as an incarnation of
the “diseases, neuroses, and traumas which are buried in the foundations of Western culture.” She is a postwar immigrant, a victim of the
Holocaust, sexual abuse, AIDS, sexual violence, and drug addiction.
She represents, in other words, “the festering cancers that scar Western
society and the suppression of their memory” (149). She is everywhere,
and, however she is configured, her boundaries reach far beyond her
body and her narrative.1
Zenia and Iris as character types are no strangers to Atwood’s fiction. They have numerous predecessors. In concocting fictions of their
pasts, Zenia and Iris resemble what Barbara Hill Rigney identifies
in her discussion of Alias Grace as the “woman as fabricator, seamstress, weaver, spider who becomes one with the image of the taleteller writer.” The motif is familiar in much of Atwood’s fiction: artist/
protagonist/witch who is “capable of casting spells” and who is “on
trial for witchcraft if not murder” (158, 163). As tale-teller and shifter
of stories, they recall Offred in The Handmaid’s Tale, who always
insists that her story is a “reconstruction.” Both Zenia and Iris also
exemplify the allure of the defiant, who-gives-a-damn bad girl. They
are sexually free Katherine-Kath-Kat-K who would not think twice
about coating her preserved ovarian cyst in chocolate and sending it
to the lover who abandoned her. She does as she pleases, heedless of
what others may think of her. They are Moira of The Handmaid’s Tale,
who, in defiance of the right-wing fundamentalist Republic of Gilead,
binds Aunt Elizabeth to the toilet seat, steals her clothes, and swaggers
out of the fundamentalist compound.2 Zenia extends the character
composite even further. In her not-quite death, she bears kin to Joan
Foster in Lady Oracle, who “[plans] her death carefully,” giving up her
traditional life—“years of murdered breakfasts”—to escape into multiple lives, multiple identities, and reckless pleasure (Lady Oracle 3–7).
Zenia, too, bears resemblance to Lucy in “Death by Landscape,” who,
as the more dazzling of the Lucy-Lois pair, breaks the rules, spurns the
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other’s opinions, and, in an act of rebellion, burns her sanitary napkin.
And like Lucy, her presence, even in her absence, is pervasive.3
Iris, The Blind Assassin’s narrator, is rather like a blend of Elaine
Risley and Cordelia from Cat’s Eye. That is, instead of projecting
her anger and insecurity onto another character, an evil twin, Iris is
allowed the complexity of being both the insecure victim and the insecure victimizer. She is, after all, compared to a blind assassin, not just
to a cunning, malevolent assassin. Or she is like Tony from The Robber
Bride, who is able to act out some of her fantasies as Tnomerf Ynot,
rather than just projecting them onto Zenia. Although she remains
willfully blind to the extent of her complicity in her sister Laura’s
death, clues in the text suggest her ambiguous nature.4
Iris bears a marked resemblance to some of the more unflattering depictions of Guinevere from the Arthurian legends. As Atwood
makes reference to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Iris is associated
with the deceitful and adulterous queen in some portrayals, as well as
the innocent victim in others. And as in William Morris’s “Defence of
Guenevere,” she, too, insists that her accusers are erroneous in their
pronouncements against her: “Nevertheless you lie” is her persistent
response when confronted with the evidence of her betrayal of Arthur.
Similar to the poem’s queen, who flirts with surreptitiously admitting the truth while denying the interpretation, Iris acknowledges the
actual events from her past but argues against the interpretations of
her intent. Yes, Iris/Guinevere does have an adulterous affair with
Alex/Lancelot betraying Richard/Arthur and destroying any possible
romance of Laura/Elaine with Alex. And yes, Iris/Guinevere can be
held partially accountable for the death of Laura/Elaine; however, Iris
affirms that her affair is justified and that Laura has maintained unrealistic illusions, or as it may be according to Iris, delusions. Yet Iris
would also have her readers—and perhaps herself—believe that it was
she who was the Elaine, not her sister. She would like us to see her as
Elaine (or Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot”) who spent her lonely days
weaving a vision of the world she is forbidden to enjoy while being
barred from her rightful lover.
Iris bears kinship with Elaine in Cat’s Eye, who embarks upon a
memoir of her past. Yet Elaine, while also depicting herself as victimized, ultimately acknowledges her own retaliatory torment that she
inflicts on Cordelia. After the trials of her childhood, Elaine reveals her
subsequent treatment of the now-weakened girl. As Cordelia’s power
has been eradicated, Elaine gloats over her own “mean mouth” and
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her cavalier behavior with the troubled Cordelia. In the end, Elaine
laments the loss of her “twin,” regretting the lack of reconciliation.
Iris, however, overtly refuses to bear adequate responsibility for her
actions. While she must admit having a part in the tragedy of Laura’s
death, Iris attempts to maintain the posture of innocence.
Iris is also kin to Serena Joy in Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,
a woman resentful of her aging, a woman whose potential freedom
to enjoy her age and acquired wisdom has been thwarted by the very
community she strove to create. By watching the videotapes of her
earlier evangelical self, Serena Joy validates that she was, in fact, a
vital part of the social change in which she is now trapped—in other
words, she has made her own bed.5 However, the narration of Iris in
The Blind Assassin seems less of a spiritual retrospection to articulate
the truth—even if it is painful—than a clever and maybe desperate
fabrication in an attempt to perpetuate the myth she has created.
Rather than reminiscing with angry resignation like Serena Joy, Iris is
determined to present her version, her history.
In the present time of her narration, Iris is an elderly woman,
antagonistic and alienated. Her days are marked by a daily proprietary
trek to the button factory—once possessed by her father—and an internal diatribe directed toward those individuals, both alive and dead,
who may have cared for her. Iris measures her life by how much pain
she is still capable of inflicting, from her incomprehensible sneering at
Walter and Myra,6 who seem to be under no obligation to Iris, to her
passionate self-defense in regard to her treatment of her adoring sister
Laura. For example, in an acerbic yet funny admission, Iris recounts
with relish her rudeness to the disciples of Laura. One of her responses
to inquiries about obtaining Laura’s letters reads as follows: “Dear
Miss W., In my view your plan for a ‘Commemoration Ceremony’ at
the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase’s tragic death is both
tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are
suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema” (286). Iris
recounts, “For years I took grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling” (287). Iris spares no one, not her lawyer, not her family, and
not the people she sees on the street. Her narration, then, is more than
suspect. As James Held asserts, Iris’s tale “brims with suspense and
pathos, horrendous betrayals and monstrous lies” (“Sisters”).
Certainly, definitions of the postmodern literary tend to include
recognition of the aspects of any narrator’s inherent unreliability. Brian
McHale, among others, posits that postmodern-era authors capitalize
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on readers’ acceptance of blatant misdirection in narrative and their
unwillingness to discredit the authority of the narrator. Atwood, however, inverts this phenomenon, forcing readers, in fact, to question
Iris’s authority. That is, although Iris attempts to manipulate her text
to elicit sympathy from the readers, the readers find they must resist
the perhaps natural tendency to identify with the narrator. Iris’s bid for
absolution falters as the readers cannot suspend skepticism.
That Iris is an unreliable narrator is more than obvious. However,
unlike a traditional unreliable narrator, such as Nick Carraway in F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, who appears to be convinced
of the validity of his rendition of Jay Gatsby’s romantic nobility, Iris’s
legitimate conviction of the veracity of her version of the events—as
well as her motive for the narration itself—is highly questionable. Just
as Laura argues that her “enhancements” of the photographs’ faces
demonstrate the “colours” of the subjects’ “souls” (“It’s the colours
they ought to have been in” [194]), The Blind Assassin’s readers become
aware that Iris is narrating the story in the colors in which she would
like it to be presented. She writes, “Most people prefer a past in which
nothing smells” (52). But, as Roberta Rubenstein recognizes, Iris can
be “duplicitous,” “self-serving and untrustworthy” (236).
Contrary to attempting an honestly objective viewpoint, Iris presents her version to depict herself in a more flattering tone; she exhibits
little of Zenia’s devil-may-care-if-I-am-a-bad-girl demeanor, although
often her bad-girl persona is irrepressible. Iris’s goal involves ignoring the exterior appearance of her behavior while, paradoxically, presenting an exterior narrative that is “colored” with her contradictory
assessments. Molly Hite recognizes that the plot is propelled by “the
need to understand Laura, or to understand how Iris understands
Laura” (1). And while Iris’s memoir is, in part, her ostensible attempt
to explain Laura’s mysterious death, there are other strategies informing the narrative. Iris may also be seen as surreptitiously bragging
about her unnoticed victories, while maintaining the appearance of victimization. The very last portion of the first chapter contains Iris’s justification: “But some people can’t tell where it hurts. They can’t calm
down. They can’t ever stop howling” (2). Questioning the prospect
that her memory is tainted by rhetorically asking, “is what I remember
the same thing as what actually happened?” Iris tellingly responds
by stating, “It is now: I am the only survivor” (217–18). Iris initially
maintains that the only way she can write the truth is to assume that
what she writes will never be read, yet she admits, “At the very least we
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want a witness. We can’t stand the idea of our own voices falling silent
finally, like a radio running down” (95), tacitly acknowledging that
she does in fact anticipate an audience.7 Thus, early in the novel, the
unnamed woman in one of The Blind Assassin’s three intertwined narratives complains to her storytelling lover who has reacted to her objections by promising to “rewrite history”; she states: “You can’t,[.] . . .
The word has gone forth. You can’t cancel half a line of it” (30).
However, Iris, in writing/revising the prevailing version of history—for
example, subverting in her memoir the public’s assumption that Laura
Chase has written the novel—clearly indicates that history can indeed
be rewritten, undermined, reconceptualized.
Many reviewers of the novel, while acknowledging certain narrative sleight of hand, have tended to absolve Iris of purely malicious
intent. For example, Ann Janine Morey sees Iris as a “typical” Atwood
narrator: “a bewildered cynical female narrator [who] senses the horror of her own spiritual emptiness” (28). Likewise, Brenda Wineapple
describes Iris as a woman who was “taught self-effacement, obedience, modesty and quiescence” (58). Yet she also asserts that Iris is a
“woman without affect who nightly accedes to her husband’s savagery,
insulates herself from her sister’s suffering and refuses to see the incest
and adultery and suicide committed before her eyes. Yes, yes, she is
a kind of blind assassin, cutthroat and complex, herself a wounded
child impassively doing what she has to do” (59). As the blind assassin
of the novel, Iris and her killing story are imported with both invention
and destruction. Furthermore, Iris’s tale contains certain clues that
she has positioned herself in the middle of some romantic fairy tale.
Most tellingly, her recitation of her married life is remarkably similar
to her childhood fantasies about Adelia, her long-dead grandmother.
Iris writes that Adelia was “married off” to “money—crude money,
button money. She was expected to refine this money, like oil” (59).8
Iris further remembers, “I used to romanticize Adelia. I would gaze out
of my window at night, over the lawns and the moon-silvered bed of
ornamentals, and see her trailing through the grounds in a white lace
tea gown. I gave her a languorous, world-weary, faintly mocking smile.
Soon I added a lover” (60). When recounting how the house—Avilion—was named, Iris believes that Adelia’s choice of King Arthur’s
death place signified “how hopelessly in exile she considered herself to
be” (61). Finally, Iris admits that she and Laura were “brought up” by
Adelia: “inside her conception of herself. And inside her conception of
who we ought to be” (62). As Iris’s own marriage was a marriage of
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commerce, she claimed to have had a lover, and she, too, portrays a life
of “exile,” the similarities of both suggest her indoctrination by Adelia.
However, Iris’s feelings of entrapment also suggest how disillusioned
she has become with her earlier fantasies.
Iris’s tinting of herself as the victim is prevalent throughout the
novel. She describes herself as one of the sheep who are “so dumb they
jeopardize themselves, and get stuck on cliffs or cornered by wolves”
(243). Yet this depiction hardly rings completely true when compared
with other descriptions of herself as conniving and rebellious. In particular, her description of herself in the novel-within-the-novel “The Blind
Assassin” as a young woman who lies and steals contrasts markedly
with the naïve and silent new wife who endures her husband’s brutality and suffers through her sister-in-law Winifred’s manipulations. And
although Iris presents herself as a victim, enduring a virtually loveless
existence, her frequent protestations of caring for her sister are often
undercut by her depictions of events.
This is not to say, however, that Iris’s intentions are without some
mitigating factors; she often acknowledges her ambivalence and her
ambiguous purposes. While Zenia in The Robber Bride is clearly weaving webs of lies to ensnare her victims and provoke confrontation,
Iris often reflects upon her confusion. In describing the photograph of
herself as a child and Laura as an infant that resided on her mother’s
night table, Iris sees her own “accusing” and angry expression and
wonders, “Was I angry because I’d been told to hold the baby, or was
I in fact defending it? Shielding it—reluctant to let it go?” (85). Yet she
also concedes that she and Laura were engaged in battle. With distinct
irritation, after her mother has voiced her dying wish that Iris be a
“good sister,”9 she asks, “I felt I was a victim of injustice: why was it
me who was supposed to be a good sister to Laura, instead of the other
way around?” She reflects that her mother’s love for both sisters “was
a given—solid and tangible, like a cake. The only question was which
one of us was going to get the bigger slice” (93).
Iris complains, “I didn’t know that I was about to be left with [my
mother’s] idea of me; with her idea of my goodness pinned onto me like
a badge, and no chance to throw it back at her” (94). Feeling bound by
her mother’s request, Iris maintains the front of dutiful sister. However,
Iris trains herself to exploit the art of miscommunication and misdirection, and the narrative often reveals Iris’s desire to hide or distort the
truth. Iris learns early the power of such “tinting.” She notes that when
she and Laura were little, they would shift their “dull grey oatmeal”
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into the pools of colored light made as the sun came through a stainedglass window, making it “magic food, either charmed or poisoned
depending on my whim or Laura’s mood” (99). Likewise, when writing
of her supposedly sadistic and pedophiliac tutor, Mr. Erskine, she
allows, “in addition to lying and cheating, I’d learned half-concealed
insolence and silent resistance. I’d learned that revenge is a dish best
eaten cold. I’d learned not to get caught” (167).
It becomes increasingly obvious that Iris maintains a certain amount
of animosity toward her sister. When Laura was a child, Iris remembers
following Laura and pushing her to the ground on the day of their
mother’s funeral, and how she enjoyed Laura’s crying: “I wanted her
to suffer too—as much as me. I was tired of her getting away with
being so young” (97). Her resentment toward Laura—whom she even
subtly accuses of being responsible for their mother’s death—continues
throughout the novel, culminating, of course, with her brutal revelation that she and Alex were lovers, a revelation and sisterly betrayal
that may have caused Laura to commit suicide.10
Just as Zenia is both other and doubled self to Tony, Charis, and
Roz, so, too, are Iris and Laura both opposite and alike. Michiko
Kakutani writes, “it soon becomes clear that [Iris and Laura] are
alter egos of sorts—doppelgangers and soul mates” (“Three Stories”).
Alex’s treatment of the sisters exemplifies their otherness: whereas he
calls the fourteen-year-old Laura “a saint in training” (212)11 while he
is hiding at Avilion, he is sexually provocative toward Iris, kissing her
and unbuttoning her blouse. In Iris’s accounts, the sisters could not
be more different. Laura is ethereal; Iris is solid flesh (which bruises).
Laura is socially conscious; Iris is materially conscious. Laura is a
dreamer; Iris is “practical” (212). Laura yearns for Alex’s soul; Iris
wants his body. Laura is Mary, and Iris is Martha (216).
Yet Alex, too, apparently recognizes their likeness to each other.
In telling Iris the story of the Peach Women of Planet Aa’A, Alex
recounts a tale of men’s idea of perfect women: “One was a sexpot; the
other was more serious-minded and could discuss art, literature, and
philosophy, not to mention theology.” Clearly, Alex is describing first
Iris, then Laura. Yet he also claims, “The girls seemed to know which
was required of them at any given moment, and would switch around
according to the moods and inclinations” of the men (353–54). Alex,
in his own tinted storytelling, seems to be warning Iris that perfectly
accommodating women can be “tedious” and irritating; ultimately
the male protagonists of the story wish to escape, even though their
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apparent paradise offers them the granting of every desire. Alex hints
that Iris and Laura are too much alike in their need and care for him,
a need, perhaps, born out of competition.
As Iris and Laura are doubles or mirrored images of each other, Iris
measures who she is by what is lacking in Laura. If Laura is “good,”
then she is evil. But Iris has a way of making “goodness” seem eccentric or false: “Don’t misunderstand me,” she states, “I am not scoffing
at goodness, which is far more difficult to explain than evil, and just as
complicated. But sometimes it’s hard to put up with” (366). If Laura
is altruistic in gritty and needy situations, Iris participates in charity
work at superficial costume balls. If Laura is challenged by the meaning of language, Iris claims to be accepting of what is said to her and
only questions the validity of language after it has been proven false.12
Iris’s antithetical behavior, then, reflects her ambivalence and resentment toward Laura.
But Iris, taught “concealment,” cannot provoke confrontation.
Instead, she enacts revenge under cover, much as she writes The Blind
Assassin under Laura’s name. Iris is well aware of Laura’s feelings for
Alex, and she blatantly ignores the strength of Laura’s devotion—not
only to Alex but also to herself in her quest to renounce Laura. Iris
tints the reader’s perceptions of Laura, making her appear vague and
eccentric at best, insane at worst. Yet, at many times during the novel,
Laura appears to be quite astute—even worldlier than Iris, such as
when she instructs Iris on what to expect on her wedding night. Tragically, Iris is never able to totally recognize herself in Laura and vice
versa. Although she comments on their similarities—acknowledging,
for example, that both are “too secretive for charm, or else too blunt”
(233), she continues to insist upon their irreconcilable differences.
Both have, of course, been orphaned and need to rely upon each other.
Yet, more than the lack of parents, both share the need for connection, acceptance, and growth beyond their present states. Iris gives us
a fleeting vision of their unity when they share a moment after their
father’s death: “We went straight up to Laura’s room and sat down on
her bed. We held on tightly to each other’s hands—left in right, right
in left” (313). This union is particularly poignant given that the photographs they have of themselves with Alex contain the severed hand
of the other sister.
Clues to the “true” events are most liberal in the narrative within
a narrative, “The Blind Assassin,” published with Laura named as
author. Readers may speculate that Iris, armed with the power of ano-
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nymity, feels comfortable enough not to overly protest her innocence.
During one of the lovers’ trysts, Iris, as the unnamed woman, boasts,
“It’s not my heart that’s bloody, it’s my mind. I’m bloody-minded. Or
so I’ve been told” (131). And thus, Laura, not Iris, is the “victim” of
the novel, and unlike Tony, Charis, and Roz, she dies instead of transcending the betrayal to which she is subjected. One could say that the
novel has two victims, the blind assassin and the one she kills. In this
way it is a more complex rendering of the ability to hurt than the earlier novel, as we come to understand and eventually empathize with
both the victim and the perpetrator.
Iris’s failure to resolve her ambivalence or to truthfully and completely admit to her behaviors in the past may then be due to her
polarized ways of thinking. If, like her father’s legs—one of which
is “good” and one injured and therefore “bad”—Iris has been viewing herself and Laura as mirrored images of each other, then Iris has
become trapped in a detrimental mode of assessing the past. In Laura’s
Latin notebook, Iris finds a translation of the goddess Iris freeing
grief-stricken Dido’s soul from her body with death. Laura is clearly
absolving Iris from her betrayal. But, unlike Tony, Charis, and Roz,
who actively work to reconnect their severed selves and accept both
the positive and negative aspects of those selves, Iris often rejects the
possibility of spiritual becoming. She admits as much in the final passages: “But what is a memorial, when you come right down to it, but a
commemoration of wounds endured. Endured and resented. Without
memory, there can be no revenge” (508).
Atwood suggests that age does not necessarily endow one with
wisdom, character, or spirituality. The specter of impending death
does not automatically release the urge to confess, atone, and cleanse.
Iris manifests only few and late signs of resigned regret, acceptance,
or regenerated wisdom. And unlike Tony, Charis, and Roz, who deny
complicity with Zenia and refuse to allow pain and anger to dominate
their remaining lives, Iris can only wonder, “How lost to myself I have
become” (298).
It is only in the few remaining pages that Iris suggests her own
part in Laura’s tragedy, and she does so only after deciding to leave
the manuscript to Sabrina. Iris’s own admission is belated. She relates:
“I did believe, at first, that I only wanted justice. I thought my heart
was pure. We do like to have such good opinions of our own motives
when we’re about to do something harmful, to someone else” (497).
In a sense, although Iris is unable to embrace the truth completely,
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she offers Sabrina the “chance to reinvent” herself at will by proposing multiple versions of Sabrina’s parentage to choose from (513).
Given the possible interpretations of the narrative, Sabrina may choose
her grandmother—Iris or Laura, as Laura has claimed to be Aimee’s
mother, her baby switched at birth to replace Iris’s possibly dead baby.
She might also choose her grandfather—Alex or Richard, as both may
have had sexual relations with each of the sisters. In other words, she
attempts to free Sabrina from the kind of fixed role Iris has felt to be
imposed upon herself. In this way, although she has rejected a spiritual
journey of her own, she acts as spiritual guide to Sabrina by giving her
the power of choice, a choice she felt was denied to her.
In The Robber Bride, one aspect of the spiritual journey—the confrontation, acceptance, and, most importantly, self-recognition of otherness—is readily apparent. This encounter with the other is how most
critics read the tour de force that ensues when Zenia’s life collides
with those of Tony, Charis, and Roz. Jennifer Enos notes that Zenia
is the composite of each of their names (14).13 Karen Stein sees her as
a “shadow self, a mirror of the darker side, the hidden anxieties of
each character” (99). Indeed, Zenia does mirror the three women she
betrays. The question then becomes, what do Tony, Roz, and Charis
learn from this confrontation with otherness? What knowledge do
they gain from this lethal quest in which the café that sets the novel
in motion is an anagram for Quixote (ibid. 98)? Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis sees Zenia as providing an “intersubjective space” in which each
of the characters learns to heal: Tony, in her exchanges with Zenia,
discovers the pleasures of sharing her “inner world” with others; Charis, in providing physical nurture to Zenia, learns the importance of
her own bodily needs; and Roz, in finding a deeper acceptance of her
parents, learns to accept herself more fully. All three learn “some new
ways to navigate the in-between space that separates and joins us to
the other” (167). For Lynn Bloom and Veronica Makowsky, Zenia
is a “feminist avenger” who teaches the trio “to take charge of their
lives” (170). Donna Potts sees the three women gaining independence
from a colonized and patriarchal identity and, in the process, refusing the phallocentric “impulse to dichotomize” (297), while Shannon
Hengen interprets Zenia as a means of escaping imprisoning relationships. Sonia Mycak sees Zenia, in spite of her nastiness, as an avenue
toward a more liberated consciousness. For J. Brooks Bouson, Zenia
is a mirror to “repressed” and “outlawed emotions” that enable a
metamorphosis from victim to survivor (150), and for Sarah Appleton
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Aguiar, Zenia is a conduit for rediscovering the repressed “bitch,”
for integrating “rejected qualities” into a previously split and attenuated self (132)14 As Sharon Wilson notes in Margaret Atwood’s FairyTale Sexual Politics, Atwood has repeatedly resisted making the Good
Woman tantamount to passivity, refusing to split images of the Great
Mother into the “positive mother and the destructive witch” (17).15
This is especially true in her treatment of Zenia. Associated with the
moon in a tarot reading for Charis, seen by Tony as “glowing” like
the moon, and associated with destructive blood from the slaughter of
Charis’s chickens, Zenia embodies the Destroyer aspect of the Triple
Goddess. Her rage stems from her amputation—patriarchal society’s
refusal to acknowledge the creative and the destructive as existing
simultaneously in the mother figure (see Wilson, Sexual Politics). Or,
one might add, her rage is the result of her suppression and control by
patriarchal hermeneutics. She becomes that which has produced her:
sheer power.
Zenia, not unsurprisingly, inspires envy: she is reckless, excessively
beautiful, and free from the tyranny of others’ perceptions. As Jean
Wyatt notes, Zenia is the Lacanian real, “that which exceeds the symbolic order, that which no signifier can represent, that which those
inside the symbolic order are at a loss to account for.” She is the
“image of the uncastrated self capable of unfettered and unlimited
self-expression” (42). And, in that freedom, she wields power. She
expresses the rebellion that the young, demure Tony cannot—something Tony consciously acknowledges when she agrees to write Zenia’s
term paper for her. She resembles Tony’s “invisible twin,” the Russian
or Martian sounding Tnomerf Ynot: “Taller, stronger, and more daring” than Tony (153). After the uncomfortable dinner where Tony’s
father grills her mother on the bridge club meeting she did not attend,
Tony goes up to her room and “murmurs to herself in the darkness”
the words “bulc egdirb,” and immediately a full-fledged scene emerges:
“The barbarians gallop across the plains. At their head rides Tnomerf
Ynot, her long ragged hair flying in the wind, a sword in each of her
hands. Bulc egdirb! she calls, urging them forward. It’s a battle cry
and they are on the rampage” (163). It is the language Tony uses to
camouflage her increasing distance from her mother and to empower
herself. It is nearly the same image that Tony has of Zenia after Zenia
relays the story of her sex-commodifying White Russian mother: Zenia
has been through horrors and has emerged victorious. “Tony pictures
her on a horse, cloak flying, sword arm raised” (184). For Tony, Zenia,
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initially, is a means to fighting back her feelings of abandonment and
powerlessness.
When the three encounter the resurrected Zenia at the Toxique,
Tony reports, “Zenia is as beautiful as ever.” Her hair is “blown around
her head by the imperceptible wind that accompanies her everywhere,
moulding her clothes against her body, fitfully moving the dark tendrils
around her forehead, filling the air with a sound of rustling” (36).
For Charis, she “strides right past them in her richly textured dress,
with her long legs, her startling new breasts, her glossy hair nebulous around her shoulders” (73). Associated with the “imagery of the
moon, of light and dark,” she is, as Stein notes, “like a goddess”: her
hair is “black and alive like Medusa’s” (99). She enthralls and casts
spells. And usually she is quite good at winning whatever she desires.
She is raw power, what Cynthia Kuhn identifies as a “Toxic Chic”
(49). When Tony, Charis, and Roz first meet her as younger women,
Zenia is a seeming conduit who can heal the wounds of abandonment,
abuse, and infidelity.
For all three women, Zenia also represents a freedom to break the
rules, a freedom from the injunction to forever please. Impassive to the
judgments of others, weaver of enthrallments, she is Cixous’s “Laugh
of Medusa,” who offers an alternative to a confining, goody-two-shoes
conventionality. Who hasn’t at least once had a flickering desire to
throw a “revenge party” (141)?16 Who hasn’t had the desire to scrap
the law of the Father, particularly since to live under its reign is to
acquiesce to its containing labels of femininity: as lack, as nothingness,
as mirror to masculinity? Who hasn’t had a fleeting impulse to throw
guilt overboard—to say to hell with all those save-the-whales, save-thefeminine-victims, save-the-raped-moms, save-the-battered-grannies,
save-everybody campaigns. “Poky, boring charities,” Roz notes. How
“daring” and “liberating” to say “to hell with guilt!” (107). “It was
like speeding in a convertible, tailgating, weaving in and out without
signaling, stereo on full blast and screw the neighbors, throwing your
leftovers out the window, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the halfeaten filo pastries and the champagne truffles” (107). As Jean Wyatt
notes, “Good girls all, the protagonists envy Zenia’s untrammeled inhibition, her ineffable evasion of the ‘ineluctable law’ of the father, and
her heedless jouissance” (52). Zenia plays unbridled double to Tony,
Charis, and Roz. And she is us. Well, maybe not exactly us—us minus
the excessive beauty, the exotic tour de force, the seemingly unassailable power. Tony, Charis, and Roz do learn from Zenia, and they do
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envy her. However, the doubleness Zenia proffers and the insights the
protagonists gain are more complicated than simply a recognition and
acknowledgment of the Other.17 In spite of surface similarities, something sets Zenia apart from her fictional predecessors whose rebellion against conventionality, social repression, and theocratic tyranny
wields an appeal, even if that appeal comes with a price. It is that difference that articulates the spiritual crisis that confronts Tony, Charis,
Roz, and ultimately the reader.
Granted, what we see of Zenia is filtered through Tony, Roz, and
Charis,18 but with that caveat aside, what we see once we get beyond
the razzle-dazzle is, in Tony’s words, “pure freewheeling malevolence”
(458). As Roz suggests, she “kicks low and dirty,” figures out “where
the jugular is,” and then goes for it (113–14). In the abandoned Tony,
Zenia discerns the need for a never-experienced human connection,
and thus she emerges “like a long-lost friend, like a sister, like a wind,”
whom Tony welcomes (127). Thus, for Tony, she is an orphan whose
White Russian mother rented her out for sex when she was just five or
six. In Charis, Zenia discerns a battered psyche that needs to reunite
body and spirit, one who, subjected to physical abuse as a child, cannot bear to picture another’s pain. She thus appears in Charis’s yoga
class, bruised and helpless, seeking alternative strategies for healing. In
her life story designed for Charis, she is the daughter of a clairvoyant,
Romanian gypsy who was murdered by the Germans and left to die in
the snow. In successful magazine editor Roz, plagued by her CatholicJewish background, Zenia senses Roz’s insecurities surrounding her
father and her husband. Thus, for Roz, Zenia surfaces as a journalist/consummate storyteller who offers Roz a story she cannot refuse.
She is, for Roz, the displaced child whose partial Jewish heritage forces
her parents to spirit her out of Nazi Germany, a feat made possible by
Roz’s father as heroic liaison. When the trio, as young women, first
meets Zenia, the lure she exudes initially seems to answer the lack in
each of their lives. For each of them, Zenia finds a tale that provides
an empathetic link, one that says, “I, the Other, am like you.”19
The trio’s later confrontation with Zenia, however, yields something different. Although each of the three women is drawn to Zenia’s
magnetism and would like to become her at some point, ultimately
they recognize that she is not someone they wish to become; all three,
in the end, refuse to kill her and, in doing so, reject becoming her. Thus,
although Zenia is the catalyst for envy in the young women’s lives, it is
Zenia herself as a force of envy and pure lust for power that each of the
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three women characters must recognize and ultimately refuse. In her
“staking out territory” (111), Zenia displaces one by one Tony, Charis,
and Roz when she steals their men. She occupies their space and substitutes her own presence for their own. In this it is Zenia who dramatizes
envy.20 Zenia gains little from her exploits. Aside from the money, she
does not really want the booty she acquires: West, Mitch, and Billy are
merely trifles to be tossed away. Like the weasel of “Weasel Nights,”
Zenia’s pleasure is in the taking, in the depletion of others. Commenting on the “primitive origins of envy,” Jean Wyatt notes that envy often
attributes a kind of omnipotence to the other: “in the moment of envy
one perceives only the other’s power, only the subject mastery of a particular field, only the state of being one desires to possess. The facet of
the other’s life that one envies fills out the other’s whole figure, eclipsing
the parts of his or her existence that might be unsatisfactory. (Indeed,
even if one knows that the other is unhappy in some aspect of her life,
that knowledge is blocked by envy.) Envy is in the first instance a desire
to be the other, to possess his or her power” (54–55). As Wyatt further
notes, “the sentiment, ‘I want to be you,’” nevertheless, “does not fully
account for the malevolence, the nastiness” frequently attributed to
envy: the “desire to enjoy the other woman’s success includes a desire
to replace her.” The “underlying calculus works like this: ‘there is only
one position, and there are two of us; therefore you must go so I can be
in your place and be filled with all that you now possess,’ or, phrased
more directly, ‘Get out of my way, I want to be you’” (Wyatt 55, 59).21
Such a supplanting is, however, an impossible fantasy. The “venom of
envy” emerges in the thwarted drive: “the bitter desire to denigrate the
other is the secondary effect of the subject’s frustration that s/he cannot
be the other” (ibid. 55). Driven not by a longing for a desired object
but by an inner vacuum or an absence of subjectivity, Tony, Charis,
and Roz do not really embody envy; envy does not fully reflect Tony’s,
Charis’s, and Roz’s response to Zenia; it does, however, reflect Zenia’s
response to them.22 And there is no question that the three at some
point want to become Zenia. In this they do envy her. However, it is
Zenia, in usurping others’ space, who dramatizes it. Although Wyatt’s
analysis focuses on the envy generated in Tony, Charis, and Roz, she
does acknowledge that Zenia herself enacts envy (58).
What Tony and the others eventually learn in their confrontations
with Zenia is the ability to set boundaries. As Tony intuits early in the
novel, “People like Zenia can never entangle themselves in your lives
unless you invite them” (127). It is not until the end, however, that
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Tony and the others are finally able to set those boundaries, each of
them recognizing the ploys in Zenia’s final tales and then refusing to
succumb to their enticements or to Zenia’s machinations.
This recognition for Tony, Charis, and Roz emerges late in the
diegetic narrative. The tactics of power and victimization that Zenia
wields, however, confront the reader throughout the text. In this Zenia
functions as a warning to the reader, a means for identifying power tactics and avoiding their implicit victimization. Zenia is a superb strategist who incisively schemes her way into Tony’s, Charis’s, and Roz’s
lives. As a military historian, Tony plots intricate military maneuvers,
replaying “decisive battles” in order to see whether “they could conceivably have been won by the losing side.” She “studied the maps,
the accounts, the disposition of the troops, the technologies.” The
battles were not personal; they were simply “problems that might have
been solved in another way” (130). Likewise, Tony, Charis, and Roz
were nothing personal for Zenia; they were challenges, battles strategically planned. The only emotion was the thrill of winning: Zenia,
in effect, uses Tony’s own strengths against her. In appealing to what
Tony initially sees as a mutually shared intellect, Zenia befriends her
and strikes up an intellectual connection embellished with an isolated,
haughty air: the mind and towers—elements with which Tony is very
much at home.
Gradually, she uses these comfort zones to detect cracks in Tony’s
armor. She interrogates in an inquisition-like fashion with questions
that catch Tony off guard: “What would cause you to kill yourself?”;
“What if you had cancer?”; “Well, then what would cause you to
kill someone else?” (145). She draws her out, gets her to talk about
what she never talks about—her mother, the most vulnerable part of
her life—and then she uses that exposed vulnerability to belittle Tony
and steal her strength. Of Tony’s mother, Zenia remarks, “She sounds
fun-loving” and “full of life.” Then she goes on “cheerfully” to say, “I
bet she tried to have an abortion, and it didn’t work out” (180). This
strategy wields a quadruple blow. In valorizing Tony’s mother as “funloving” and “full of life,” it dismisses Tony’s most vulnerable feelings,
trusted to this point to no one, as frivolous. In suggesting a possible
abortion, it intensifies Tony’s sense of abandonment. In encouraging
Tony to contemplate that “it could be true,” it causes her to have an
even darker view of her mother than before. Finally, it erases the insidious cruelty through a cavalier cheerfulness that pretends nothing has
happened. What Zenia employs are well-known strategies of power:
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catch your enemies off guard; use their vulnerability; create distraction
through doubt and paranoia; perform outrageous acts and then act
as if the damage is nothing, rendering any protest as the fault of the
victim.
Zenia also manipulates Tony into feeling guilty for things for which
she should feel no guilt, such as making West a cup of tea or admiring
Zenia’s rebelliousness, an admiration Zenia herself cultivates and then
uses to maneuver Tony to write her term paper for her. What Zenia has
plotted, however, is more than a free term paper. Attempting to paralyze Tony’s actions, she plots Tony’s destruction. Claiming a bout of
conscience, Zenia tells Tony she thinks that they should confess, which
would have ruined Tony’s raison d’être: “Now Zenia wants to tell,
and there goes Tony’s life. Many large though shadowy possibilities
loom ahead for Zenia—journalism, high finance, even politics have all
been mentioned—but university professor has never been among them;
whereas for Tony it’s the only thing. It’s her vocation; without it she’ll
be useless as an amputated hand” (191). Zenia does extort money
from Tony, but again it is more than money that Zenia wants. Zenia
wants to usurp that part of Tony that Zenia herself lacks—Tony’s intellectual focus. Reflecting on her quandary, Tony muses: “Stripped of
her intellectual honesty, her reputation, her integrity, she’ll be exiled.
And Zenia is in a position to strip her” (191). For Zenia, it is the pure
power of winning, of throwing Tony off balance, of extracting from
Tony what she can never possess. “If I can’t be you, I will destroy
you.” It is no coincidence that Tony and West watch vampire movies.
Vampirelike, Zenia wants to suck the marrow out of Tony’s life. What
Zenia wants is Tony in ruins.
With Charis, Zenia likewise plays the twin soul. Feigning a shared
interest in alternative spiritualities, Zenia manipulates her way into
Charis’s life. Utilizing Charis’s interest in the occult, Zenia claims that
her Romanian, gypsy mother was stoned and clubbed by local villagers because they thought she possessed “the evil eye” (301). As she did
with Tony, she creates an empathetic link and then exploits a sense of
guilt when Charis does not do as she pleases.
Zenia is the weasel of “Weasel Nights” and the weasel who lurks
about the farm. “They come at night,” Karen’s powerful grandmother
warms. “They bite the chickens in the neck and suck out their blood.”
It only takes one weasel in a henhouse, she continues: “They don’t
kill to eat. . . . They kill for the pleasure of it” (271). When Charis
finds Billy and Zenia have gone, she also finds her chickens dead,
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their throats slit, and their blood everywhere. She initially concludes:
“It must have been a weasel.” And Charis is right: it was a weasel of
sorts—one with a knife, for it is the “bread knife, with blood on the
blade” left in the sink that tells the whole story (309). As dippy as it
may be, Charis’s chickens “fill her with joy” (227), and it is that joy,
which Zenia lacks, that she attempts to kill—not because she can
attain it, but because the pleasure for Zenia is in the killing. As she did
with Tony, she discerns the weakness and goes for the jugular. Playing on Charis’s need to nurture and heal others (a vestige of Charis’s
own need for healing), Zenia claims she has cancer, and using Charis’s
sexual insecurities against her, she drives a wedge between Charis and
Billy. By “speaking of him in third person even when he’s standing right
there,” Zenia erases his presence: “It creates a circle, a circle of language, with Zenia and Charis on the inside and Billy on the outside”
(253). And as she did with Tony, Zenia promotes doubt. “He goes to a
lot of meetings,” she tells Charis. She uses Charis’s intuitive knowledge
systems against her, and she insists on calling Charis “Karen,” the victim of sexual abuse rendered powerless during her uncle’s assaults. By
insisting on the victimized Karen, Zenia attempts not only to imprison
Charis in her previous powerless incarnation but also to alienate her
from herself, from the partial transformation that she has acquired
through a different name.
Roz experiences a similar seduction. When Roz encounters Zenia
as a journalist posing as a waitress at Nereids, Zenia presents herself
as the successful woman with whom Roz identifies, and she offers
the story that Roz needs—a tale of her father’s heroism. When she
maneuvers her way onto the editorial board of Roz’s magazine, she
convinces Roz to drop the word Wisdom from the magazine title and
thus changes its fundamental identity. Zenia thus seduces Roz into
transforming the magazine into a statement that drains Roz of her
identity: the magazine’s essence shifts from a feminist statement to one
that privileges the glitzy body, an imprisoning image that has plagued
Roz all her life.23 Hinting at the palimpsest that she bears, Zenia comments: “Most women don’t want to read about other women who
achieve. . . . It makes them feel unsuccessful” (409). After discovering
that Zenia has run off with Mitch, Roz sees that she has been “stalemated.” Zenia is a beautiful strategist. Any countermove would be her
fault (the fault of the victimized): Her going to Mitch would “come
across as jealousy” (413).
Zenia, like the weasel in “Weasel Nights,” gets pleasure in the tak-
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ing, in the depletion of others. Since such supplanting is an impossible
fantasy, the “venom of envy” emerges in the thwarted drive: “The bitter desire to denigrate the other, is the secondary effect of the subject’s
frustration that she cannot be the other” (Wyatt 55). Lacking Tony’s
integrity, Charis’s joy in simple things, and Roz’s compassion, Zenia
denigrates each of these three women in turn. And then she disguises
the damage she wreaks. Like Charis’s mother, who uses her sweet
voice, “the too-sweet voice she used on the Grade Twos” (280), to
mask the abuse she wields (both of Charis and of one of the secondgrade pupils she teaches), Zenia works by camouflage. She is indeed a
beautiful strategist.
The ultimate task is to recognize Zenia’s power, to discern how
she wields it, and then to expose and refuse it. In the end, when Zenia
lands in the hotel room that she arranges to appeal to each visitor, all
three, after nearly being taken in by her latest story, refuse her requests.
None of them succumbed, and none of them believed her, which would
have been “another way of succumbing” (489).24 What they recognize
in the present moment is the entrapping scenario that caught them off
guard before. The reader’s recognition, however, is doubled—ascertaining the entrapment of the present moment and the weakening of
each of the character’s armor that enables the entrapment to take place
at all. And it is at this point that Zenia’s tactics are laid bare. With
her saccharine stories no longer working their seductive magic, Zenia
simply unleashes brute and cruel verbal force. This is what she says to
Tony: “You don’t believe me, do you. . . . Well, help yourself to some
righteous indignation, you little snot. You always were the most awful
two-faced hypocrite, Tony. A smug dog-in-the-manger prune-faced little shit with megalomaniac pretensions. You think you have some kind
of adventurous mind, but spare me!” She goes on to reduce her work
to a “warped little battle-scar collection” and strikes at her sexuality
by claiming that she sits on West as if he were her “own fresh-laid . . .
egg” and by announcing how sleeping with her must be like sleeping
with a “gerbil” (457).
Just as Zenia’s tactics are laid bare in the text, so are the characters’
various missteps. At the novel’s outset, Zenia plays “aphid” to Tony’s
soul long before Tony knows what is happening. It begins when Tony
joins in Zenia’s judgmental comments on others. In finding herself
excluded from Zenia’s judgments, Tony reflects how Zenia’s “contempt [is] a ‘work of art,’” how it is a “great privilege to find yourself
excluded from it.” She feels “reprieved,” “vindicated,” “grateful”—as
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145
she pads upstairs to her room to write Zenia a check (133). This slight
weakening of her armor, this brief merging with Zenia, contributes to
her doing what she most likely would never have done under other
circumstances—write Zenia’s term paper for her, a clear violation of
the academic honesty that Tony so values. It is not until the end, when
Tony refuses to let Zenia move into her apartment, that she learns to
maintain a boundary that more than likely keeps Zenia from wreaking
havoc in Tony’s life yet again. When Zenia refers to the present Billy
in third person, Charis sees what she is doing but ignores it and shifts
the blame to Billy (253). Roz can hear Tony’s voice, “Zenia lies” (401),
but she believes her anyway.25
Power wields its own appeal. Zenia herself hints at this process,
when she says of her mother who sold her into prostitution at age five,
“I adored her” and then adds, “That is how she was able to get away
with it” (183). Tnomerf Ynot, Tony’s alter ego, although destructive,
is also freewheeling and alluring. In her imagined barbarian charge,
Tnomerf Ynot’s “ragged hair” is “flying in the wind.” With Tnomerf
Ynot in the lead, they are “sweeping all before them, trampling down
crops and burning villages.” They “loot and plunder and smash pianos, and kill children.” They relish in the damage. “Tnomerf Ynot
herself drinks from a skull, with silver handles attached where the ears
used to be. She raises the skull high in a toast to victory, and to the
war god of the barbarians: Ettovag! she yells, and the hordes answer,
cheering: Ettovag! Ettovag” (163–64). It is that lure of power that each
of the trio resists in the end when they choose not to kill Zenia—not to
become her.26
And that power is not just located in the personal; it extends into
the global.27 Note this description of Zenia: “Tony pictures her on
a horse, cloak flying, a sword-arm raised; or as a bird, a silver and
miraculous bird, rising triumphant and unscathed from the cinders of
burning and plundered Europe” (184). Zenia here metamorphoses into
a plane, most specifically into a bomber. Moreover, Zenia’s entrances
are interspersed with global events. When Zenia strides past them as
if they are invisible, she projects “the smell of scorched earth” (35):
obliteration. Just before Tony recognizes Zenia at the Toxique, the discussion is focused on war and on imperial power—on how the United
States welcomes Saddam Hussein’s crossing the border into Kuwait as
an opportunity to try out their “new toys” (32). Tony comments: “The
lust for power will prevail. Thousands will die needlessly. Corpses will
rot. Women and children will perish. Plagues will rage. Famine will
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sweep the land. Relief funds will be set up. Officials will siphon off the
cash from them” (33).
This war, as it is seen through U.S. policy, however, is not war—just
as Zenia is not seen for the havoc that she wreaks. These allusions to
U.S. power and the first Gulf War, which are coterminous with the setting of the novel, become more explicit in the remaining incremental
narratives of the Toxique. In pondering Tony’s reference to the Rubicon, Charis extends Tony’s reference to the violation of boundaries; the
next moment, Zenia appears. Roz, in pondering the Rubicon, extends
its meaning (when she is not thinking about lipstick) to overexpansion,
the decline of empires; the next moment Zenia appears, “staking out
territory” (111). It is a logical extension. Atwood, in her discussion of
victim positions, notes: “The positions are the same whether you are a
victimized country, a victimized minority group, or a victimized individual” (Survival 46). The first step in overcoming victimization (someone else’s abuse of power) is naming that condition; whether in the
personal or political realm, the same processes apply.
When Zenia first resurrects herself in the Toxique, Tony, Roz, and
Charis are discussing Gerald Bull, whose “life-time obsession was the
construction of a ‘Supergun,’ a huge howitzer able to fire satellites
into space or launch artillery shells thousands of miles into enemy
territory” (FAS 1). The potential for destruction is clear: “Bull specialized in increasing the range of shells. He would improve their aerodynamics and would add bleeder charges to the bottom of the shells
that would emit gas to fill the vacuum left behind a shell in flight”
(Redford 2). Exploiting the concept of artillery range, Bull wanted a
gun that exceeded the distance fired by the enemy, which means one
could blow one’s enemy “to bits without risk to yourself” (ibid.)—
a bit like Zenia.28 Bull’s life story itself is unusual and bears some
uncanny resemblance to the stories surrounding Zenia: his childhood
was considered “loveless”; his mother died when he was young; his
father abandoned him; he was reared by an aunt; he was known for
his exaggerated claims; and his obsession with the supergun did not
spring from a “militarist” perspective—he “just found something he
really loved doing,” the creation of power for power’s sake (Redford
1–2). It is this same Gerald Bull to whom Zenia claims to have had
assassination ties at the end of the novel.
In the opening scenes at the Toxique where the women are discussing the first Gulf War, Roz asks, “Who’s going to win?” Tony responds,
“The battle or the war?” And then continues: “For the battle, it’ll
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147
definitely be technology. Whoever’s got air superiority. Now who could
that be?” (33). Although the United States clearly is deemed “winner
of the battle,” the outcome of the war remains unknown—apocalyptic. Whatever power tactics can be discerned in Zenia’s maneuvers at
the individual level can also be discerned at the national and global
levels. And likewise, they serve as warnings. “The personal is not political, thinks Tony: the personal is military. War is what happens when
language fails” (43). Zenia is the only one who does not tell her own
story. She is, in effect, the failure of language and its result—war. The
first Gulf War is “not a war” but “market expansion” (32). Zenia asks
Tony what she would rather have from other people, “Love, respect
or fear?” Tony at first replies “respect” and then changes her answer
to “love.” Zenia retorts: “Not me. . . . I’d choose fear.” It is, Zenia
maintains, “the only thing that works” (209). Zenia uses this strategy
throughout the novel, which the reader should see long before Tony,
Charis, and Roz do. Zenia does serve as warning in the personal realm,
but she serves equally as warning in the political one. “The personal is
military” (43). In other words, the power tactics wielded at the individual level function as a microcosm for global politics.
Ironically, now a second Gulf War wages. It, too, is “not a war”
but a “liberation.” (It is also “market expansion”—Halliburton’s
extending control over Iraqi oil fields—but the American press rarely
talks about that.) “War is what happens when language fails.” Zenia’s
response privileging fear is purely Machiavellian—“shock and awe.”
However Zenia is configured, her boundaries reach far beyond her
body and her narrative—to a global narrative that is once again in
full force. If Zenia’s enticement is, in part, an untrammeled jouissance
that has eluded the fetters of the symbolic order (most specifically
language), her roots, in Lacanian terms, remain in the imaginary, in
the prelanguage state of unarticulated desire. She represents an imaginary unity gone twisted into a desire for control and power.29 What
others see in Zenia, at least initially, is not her vacuity but the lure of
power, however illusory. As a product of the individual and cultural
imaginary, what and who she is becomes difficult to ascertain—what
she represents in many ways is beyond words, beyond language. Any
rational critique (for example, that there are no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq and never were) seems to pale. However, identifying with an untrammeled power/jouissance yields an imaginary acquisition of power, when, in reality, individual power is being siphoned
away—which explains a lot about the 2004 U.S. elections. Recognize
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the power tactics, the text urges, or as Atwood suggests in Survival,
“Naming your own condition, your own disease, is not necessarily
the same as acquiescing in it. Diagnosing it is the first step” (54). And
that is all we have. Set boundaries on the exploitation of “raw” power.
The injunction seems imperative—apocalyptic. “Who’s going to win?”
Only the answer to the “battle” was given. Who is it that is poised to
fall from that tower?30
Notes
1. See also Howells’s further commentary on The Robber Bride, in which
she notes the significance of Zenia’s postcoloniality, her role as “nomadic subject” who causes Tony, Charis, and Roz to confront issues of ethnicity and an
illusory nationality. See also Stein (99).
2. Zenia also shares with Moira the epitaph “the whore of Babylon.”
3.After Lucy disappears one day with no explanation, Lois, in a later reflection that tries to come to terms with Lucy’s disappearance, remarks: “But a dead
person is a body; a body occupies space; it exists somewhere. You can see it, put
it in a box, and bury it in the ground. But Lucy is not in a box, or in the ground.
Because she is nowhere definite, she could be anywhere” (117). Similarly, when
Zenia returns from the dead, Roz considers that “she might be anywhere” (116),
and Tony likewise reflects that she is both everywhere and nowhere.
4. My thanks go to Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis for the suggestions included
in this paragraph.
5.In contrast, Iris complains, “This, then, was where I was to grin and bear
it—the bed I hadn’t quite made” (307).
6.Iris’s disagreeable treatment of Myra—made visible by her comments in
the text as she accuses Myra of snooping after she’s dead—becomes even more
disturbing upon Iris’s revelation that Myra could be her own half-sister.
7.Iris admits, “The only way you can write the truth is to assume that
what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even
by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must
see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your
right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it. Impossible, of course” (95).
8. When Reenie meets Richard Griffen, she sneers, “He’s new money, anyhow.” She insists, “it was a well-known fact that the Griffens were common as
dirt” (175).
9.Iris’s father, shortly after her mother’s death, also asks Iris to “promise
to look after Laura” (101). The two requests may have increased Iris’s jealousy
of her sister.
10. Of course, it is possible that Laura kills herself because Iris has told her
that Alex is dead.
11.Iris also sees a halo-light surrounding her sister the day of Laura’s suicide.
12. For example, Iris’s memoir is composed of language while Laura’s comprises primarily symbols: “Avilion, no, No, No. Sunnyside, No. Xanadu, no, No.
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149
Queen Mary, no no. New York, no. Avilion, No at first. Water Nixie, X. ‘Besotted.’ Toronto again. X. X. X. X. X. O.” (500)
13. “The Z comes from the last part of Roz’s name, the en from the last part
of Charis’s original name Karen and the ia from the last part of Tony’s real name
Antonia” (Enos 14).
14. Bouson notes: “And thus Tony views Zenia as her own lawless, angry
twin identity; Charis sees Zenia as her split-off vulnerable and enraged child-self,
Karen; and Roz finds lodged in Zenia the envious and greedy aspects of her self
she wants to deny” (151). Aguiar observes that each of the protagonists has a
dream of fusion in which each merges with Zenia: “Tony sees West leaving with
Zenia, but this Zenia has ‘gills,’ a reference to Tony’s nickname of ‘Guppy.’ Charis dreams that she merges with Zenia, representing her own fear of re-emerging
with Karen. And Roz dreams that Roz is not only like her father, but that he/she
makes reference to her Catholic upbringing. These dreams reunite the fragments
of each protagonist’s separated past, joining split sides of each past. This integration is what ultimately enables each to confront Zenia and reclaim from Zenia
that which belongs to her” (133).
15. Wilson is quoting Marie-Louise Von Franz’s Shadow of Evil in Fairy
Tales (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1987), 105.
16.After the landlord evicts Tony and West, they paint the entire apartment
with the required “proper paint” but in black. Zenia notes, “It will take him
more than two coats to cover this.”
17. Call this a dialogue, if you will: Aguiar focuses on Zenia’s redemptive
function; Raschke, although acknowledging that all three characters emerge as
stronger, more complete individuals in the end, focuses on Zenia’s destructive
influence—on recognizing it and naming it.
18.As many critics have noted, Zenia, although a storyteller, does not tell her
own story. And that difference is indeed part of what sets Zenia apart, but not entirely. Lucy in “Death by Landscape” does not tell her own story, and she evokes a
positive energy in the end—“currents of energy, charged with violent color” (118).
19. Zenia also tells West a different version of her heritage that mirrors his
need to be a white knight in shining armor. For West, she is the sexually abused
victim of a Greek Orthodox priest.
20. Jean Wyatt in her reading of The Robber Bride makes a useful distinction between jealousy and envy: “As Melanie Klein established, envy rests on a
two-person rather than a three-person dynamic. While jealousy pivots on the
rivalry for a third person, the object of desire, envy is the wish to be in the other’s
place. ‘Envy is about being, not having,’ as Jessica Benjamin succinctly puts it.
In The Robber Bride each of the characters wants to be Zenia” (37). Although I
agree with both Wyatt’s definition and interpretation, I contend that Zenia is the
figure who most dramatizes the dynamics of envy.
21. Wyatt contends that under “the old rules,” women battled for a man and
in this competition viewed other women as “potential enemies,” as “threat[s]”
to their “well-being.” The battleground, however, is now shifting. Referring to
a previous dynamic in her article, Wyatt notes, “the female academics quoted
above are not competing with women in the old way for a man; rather they envy
other women for what they are, for their accomplishments or their positions of
power” (54).
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22. For all three women, Zenia does promise, as Wyatt suggests, the opportunity of wholeness, and she does serve, as Aguiar suggests, as a means of
recovering the repressed aspects of the self.
23. See also Cynthia Kuhn, who notes the impact of this change as well:
from one that emphasized intellectual content to one that embraces a “Glamouror Cosmopolitan-like format” (70).
24. Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis notes that Roz’s refusal of Zenia is more tenuous than others’ in that she “buys time” (165–66).
25. This denial, which is enacted by all three characters, is what Atwood
describes as Position One in the Basic Victim Positions in Survival. The driving
force behind Position One is denial (46).
26. Some argue that Zenia’s triple death (her falling from the tower, her
ovarian cancer, and her heroin overdose) corresponds with each of the three
women having a part in Zenia’s death. Such a literal reading does not play out.
The three’s foiled murders, which emerge as more comical than anything (e.g.,
Tony with a gun and a cordless grill), do not display the malice or the nastiness
that usually is associated with envy. Moreover, the determined cause of death
was the heroine overdose, not the fall from the tower, which was the only possible link to causality: producing a heroin overdose and ovarian cancer are not
within the trio’s scope. What they do kill is Zenia’s power over them.
27. With the exception of Cora Ann Howells’s discussion of Zenia as a Western blight and Karen Stein’s noting her associations with war, most interpretations of Zenia locate her effects in the personal. Although Stein notes Zenia’s
connections with war (“She reappears on the eve of the Gulf War, her childhood
stories are associated with war, and her connections with the three friends grow
from war stories”), she sees Zenia’s function quite differently: “Thus Zenia offers each a new story, a new interpretation of the past that may release them from
the old stories that keep them in victim positions” (102).
28. These superguns, moreover, were designed to have the potential of
“firing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons to the range of up to 1,000
kilometers.” Although this dream weapon was not manufactured, smaller versions were (GH-N-45 and G-5), the latter having the capacity to deliver both a
tactical nuclear warhead and chemical shells (FAS 1). Bull sold this technology
to Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war to further Iraq’s ability to thwart
Israel and to enable Iraq to “join the club of major nuclear powers.” This particular use of the supergun became known specifically as Project Babylon (Redford 3).
29. Lacan theorizes that the prelanguage state, what he calls the imaginary,
is marked by an imagined unity with the world. Thus, the child imagines itself
as part of everything in its world. The shift from the imaginary order to the
symbolic order is marked by an entry into language. It is coterminous with the
mirror stage in which the child also imagines a projected future-perfect “I.,” or
a unified and mastered self., which is also illusory—what Lacan calls méconnaisance. I theorize that the future-perfect “I” is also beyond language, that the
imaginary fusion the child experiences in the imaginary stage is transposed onto
an imagined all-powerful sense of the self.
30. “A rejection of war games” is the essence of Position Four in Atwood’s
victim positions (Survival 76).
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151
Works Cited
Aguiar, Sarah Appleton. The Bitch Is Back: Wicked Women in Literature. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001.
Armstrong, Karen. Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1997.
Atwood, Margaret. Alias Grace. New York: Doubleday, 1996.
———. The Blind Assassin. New York: Doubleday, 2000.
———. “Death by Landscape.” In Wilderness Tips, 99–118.
———. “Hairball.” In Wilderness Tips, 33–47.
———. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York: Doubleday, 1986.
———. Lady Oracle. 1976. New York: Random House, 1998.
———. The Robber Bride. 1993. New York: Random House, 1998.
———. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. 1972. Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 2004.
———. Wilderness Tips. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
Benjamin, Jessica. “A Desire of One’s Own: Psychoanalytic Feminism and Intersubjective Space.” In Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Lauretis,
78–101. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1986.
Bloom, Lynn Z., and Veronica Makowsky. “Zenia’s Paradoxes.” Littérature 6
(1995): 167–79.
Bouson, J. Brooks. “’Slipping Sideways’ into the Dreams of Women: The Female
Dream Work of Power Feminism in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.”
Littérature 6 (1995): 149–66.
Enos, Jennifer. “What’s in a Name? Zenia and Margaret Atwood’s The Robber
Bride.” Newsletter of the Margaret Atwood Society 15 (Fall/Winter 1995):
14.
FAS. “Project Babylon Supergun/PC-2” (October 8, 2000): http://www.fas/org/
nuke/guide/iraq/other/supergun.htm.
Held, James. “Sisters.” The Philadelphia Inquirer. Sept. 29, 2000.
Hengen, Shannon. Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors, Reflections and Images
in Select Poetry and Fiction. Toronto: Second Story P, 1993.
———. “Zenia’s Foreignness.” In Various Atwoods: Essays on the Later Poems,
Short Stories, and Novels, ed. Lorraine M. York, 271–86. Concord, ON:
Anansi, 1995.
Hite, Molly. “Tongueless in Toronto.” Women Review of Books 18, no. 6
(March 2001): 1.
Howells, Coral Ann. “The Robber Bride; or, Who Is a True Canadian?” In Textual Assassinations: Recent Poetry and Fiction, ed. Sharon Rose Wilson,
88–101. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2003.
———. “Transgressing Genre: A Generic Approach to Margaret Atwood’s Novels.” In Nischik, 139–56.
Kakutani, Michiko. “Three Stories Woven into a Suspenseful Design.” New York
Times on the Web (September 8, 2000). http://archives.nytimes.80/plweb.
Klein, Melanie. “A Study of Envy and Gratitude.” In The Selected Melanie Klein,
ed. Juliet Mitchell, 211–19. New York: Macmillan, 1986.
Kuhn, Cynthia. Self-Fashioning in Margaret Atwood’s Fiction: Dress, Culture,
and Identity. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.
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Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. New York: Norton, 1977.
Lowther, William. Arms and the Man: DR Gerald Bull, Iraq, and the Supergun.
Ovato, CA: Presidio, 1991.
Morey, Ann Janine. “The Blind Assassin (Book Review).” Christian Century
118, no. 7 (February 28, 2001): 28–29.
Morris, William. “The Defense of Guenevere.” In Victorian Poetry and Poetics,
ed. Walter E. Houghton and Robert Stange, 615. Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1968.
Mycak, Sonia. In Search of the Split Subject: Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology,
and the Novels of Margaret Atwood. Toronto: ECW Press, 1996.
Nischik, Reingard M., ed. Margaret Atwood: Works and Impact. New York:
Camden House, 2000.
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg. “Atwood’s The Robber Bride: The Vampire as Intersubjective Catalyst.” Mosaic 30 (1997): 151–68.
Potts, Donna L. “‘The Old Maps Dissolving’: Intertextuality and Identity in Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18 (1999):
281–98.
Redford, John. “General Bull, Gunsmith.” http://world.st.com/~jlr/doom/bull/
htm.
Rigney, Barbara Hill. “Alias Grace: Narrative Games and Gender Politics.” In
Nischik, 157–65.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “A Tale Told and Untold.” World & I 16 (January 2001):
234–43.
Stein, Karen. Margaret Atwood Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1999.
Walker, Barbara. The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1983.
Wilson, Sharon Rose. Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale Sexual Politics. Jackson: U
of Mississippi P, 1993.
———. “Mythological Intertexts in Margaret Atwood’s Works.” In Nischik,
215–28.
Wineapple, Brenda. “The Killer Elite.” Nation 271, no. 19 (December 11, 2000):
58–61.
Wyatt, Jean. “I Want to Be You: Envy, the Lacanian Double and Feminist Community in Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride.” Tulsa Studies in Literature 17 (1998): 37–64.
C hapter 6
Atwood’s Space Crone
Alchemical Vision and Revision in Morning in the Burned House
K athryn V an S panckeren
What kind of person would best represent the human race to beings
from another galaxy? Ursula Le Guin has imagined not a captain of
industry but instead a “Space Crone,” a poor old woman found selling
small items in a market—smart but lacking formal education, a wife
and mother, and now a grandmother. Le Guin argues that her hardearned wisdom and lifelong habit of observation would make her the
best representative of the human race. Such a woman might not care
much what others think. Social models for postmenopausal women
lacking, she has had to “give birth to herself.” Her fund of stories
would best instruct space beings about humanity.
Atwood has given us a galaxy of remarkable older women. In her
fiction, mature women whose impassive surface hides a wealth of
awareness appear in The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and, one might
argue, Oryx and Crake (Oryx’s appearance belying her harsh experiences). She appears in Cat’s Eye in the guise of an artist who can
represent experiences (such as being a repressed suburban wife of the
1950s) that she never had. Ancient Iris Chase Griffen, a master storyteller, completes her family’s story of betrayal and victimization before
The author wishes to thank the University of Tampa for a Delo Grant, which
supported this research. She also wishes to thank Margaret Atwood for permission to use
unpublished material, and the helpful staff of the Thomas Fisher Library.
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her own death by interweaving three narratives—as if she herself were
a triple goddess or the three weaving fates—in The Blind Assassin.
There is something especially uncanny about the old women in
Atwood’s poetry—one has only to think of Moodie and Circe in the
earlier volumes. Strange crones also thrive in the cracks of the hybrid
forms that Atwood has played with since Murder in the Dark was published in 1983. Interlunar (1984) features a spiraling sequence of snake
poems and weird outer-space pieces such as “Valediction: Intergalactic.” Good Bones offers a female shape-shifter (“My Life as a Bat”); a
representative from a female-only planet who foresees the extinction of
humans (“Cold-Blooded”); and another female from outer space who
tells of her people (“Homecoming”). In that book a witch warns: “I’m
the plot, babe, and don’t ever forget it” (29–30). The voices of uncanny
women carry over into her 1995 collection Morning in the Burned
House, her first volume of traditional-looking poems since Selected
Poems II came out in 1987.
Atwood’s poetry reveals recurring patterns in her artistry. Where
novels are compounds, as it were, poems are elements in a periodic
table. To adapt Baudrillard’s terms (though he is discussing modern
versus postmodern stances), the novel suggests a map while the poem
is a simulation, “nuclear and genetic, and no longer specular and discursive.” Denizens of the “dimension of simulation,” poems embody
“genetic miniaturization” that allows them to combine and recombine.
Poems are the smaller units that may be found in “matrices, memory
banks and command models.” The poem space forms “a hyperreal”
that informs the novels (Baudrillard 2–3). The notion of the hyperreal
is analogous to the process through which variable, interchangeable
motifs build up recognizable structures in folktales and myths from
oral tradition. The complex, shifting, ambiguous hyperreal that poems
inhabit, like a virtual reality, includes gaps, reversals, and paradoxes,
yet remains identifiable. No single poem can completely articulate the
whole of the shifting vision or any one of its stages; rather, the poems
participate in a larger pattern beyond them. Insofar as the poems are
artistically realized, they exist in and for themselves, but they also gesture to an imaginative space imbued with transformation.
In this essay the archetype of the female descent is treated as such a
“hyperreal”—a temporary and unstable yet recurring combination of
elements subject to inversion and reversal. To understand this hyperreal archetypal structure in the poems in Atwood’s most recent volume,
it is helpful to explore their organization, combinations, and inter-
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155
relationships. Atwood expended much energy on selecting, ordering,
and reordering them.1 For example, the most accessible poems appear
in its second part, a gallery of aging women of myth and popular
culture who take their turns on stage. From the sphinxlike Sekhmet
to movie stars such as Ava Gardner, Atwood’s personae speak in dramatic monologues—sardonic, witty, and sometimes rueful—that seem
to explode patriarchal beliefs. It would be easy to feel that these poems
represent mostly strong feminist voices. Nevertheless, none of these
voices is truly free; all are casualties in the gender wars, victims and/or
victimizers. They do not provide models for the aging, disillusioned
speaker of the first part, nor do they help her work through the death
of her father in the fourth part or go on without him in the fifth part.
No individual poem offers an overarching narrative or easy solution.
Rather, the book is indeterminate and open-ended. Taken together,
however, one can make out an intertextual pattern like an electronic
imprint. Attention to her revisions reveals her patterning vision at
work. Her changes are too many and complex to do justice to in this
article; I have confined myself to mentioning a few significant revisions.
From the beginning, Atwood’s works have issued from a profound
engagement with mythology; for example, the last chapter of her book
Negotiating with the Dead takes the descent myth as a master trope.
The novel that first brought her a wide readership—Surfacing—traces
a female descent, as well; although critics still debate whether the
descent is ironic or not, the structure is explicit and recognizable,
drawing as it does on Jungian images popularized by Joseph Campbell,
Northrop Frye, and others. It is not inappropriate to turn to popularizations in dealing with Atwood’s use of mythology, since she employs
them, as Beran has noted (86n1). In fact, she has perpetrated several
herself (notably, Survival). Atwood’s recent poems develop what Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen, who has developed a psychology of
women drawing on Greek mythology, has termed an “alchemical”
vision of female creative potential. Associated with the powerful magnetism of Aphrodite, a goddess who was never victimized and who
enjoys sensuality, alchemical vision allows women to enter freely
into new relationships—with their raw materials, if they are artists—
thereby “giving birth to” or reinventing themselves (Bolen 224, 241).
Bolen, following Paul Friedrich, notes that the words traditionally
used to describe Aphrodite—gold, honey, speech, semen—link fertility
and verbal creation.2 For Bolen, alchemical vision allows a woman to
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emerge from encounters intact yet imaginatively fertilized (not necessarily physically), like Aphrodite (224–27).
This freedom, which a virgin or mother may not be able to risk,
is the crone’s for the taking. Alchemical purification from dross is a
provocative metaphor for menopause in the case of older women, who
need no longer feel defined by their bodies and roles involving fertility
and childbearing. Earlier images of self as potential mate, wife, mother,
and nurturer no longer fully describe a woman who has moved beyond
menopause. She is freed to pursue new goals and embark on physical
or spiritual adventures. She may start a business or school or foundation, pursue a new activity or sport or art, or enter onto a spiritual
path. Whatever her pursuit, the older woman possesses a new source
of strength from within and must learn to access and assert it skillfully.
While estrogen and oxytocin induce women of childbearing age to
nurture, form associations with others, and cling to relationships, after
menopause women become more assertive, independent, and vocal
(Fisher 41, 124). Indeed, unlike men, older women do not lose their
libido; after menopause estrogen no longer masks the woman’s testosterone, the main cause of desire (ibid. 204). Especially if her children
are gone and she has achieved economic security, the older woman
is a latent powerhouse whose wisdom and energy are sorely needed
on many fronts. Atwood’s continuing activism in the public sphere
makes her a model for older women in this regard. This essay investigates how the older woman sheds previous more or less externally
imposed identities and actively rediscovers her own identity, which
often appears in dream and artwork as the image of a child, usually a
girl, alongside alchemical images such as burning, suggesting purification of flesh and earthly substance.
Wisdom is primarily associated with female goddesses in world
mythology (Young xxi–xxii). Classical myths of the female descent of
figures such as Persephone and Psyche, like the earlier Sumerian and
Babylonian mythology surrounding the descent of Inanna, suggest that
the price of wisdom, especially for women, is a descent to the underworld. Medical science indicates that the female sustains special risks
of staying in a figurative underworld: madness, depression, or obsession. Numerous studies indicate that depression afflicts almost twice
as many women as men (see Weissman and Olfson), and the madwoman in the attic has become a cliché. A descent may be particularly
hard for the old woman: society does not value the crone, and men
fear her. Demeter’s depression at the loss of Persephone brings famine.
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Sumerian Inanna (Babylonian Ishtar) narrowly escapes being trapped
in the underworld; Kore or Persephone endures a portion of each year
in hell; Euridice is left behind through Orpheus’s error.
This story of a female descent to the underworld was associated
with the story of Demeter and Persephone, celebrated for two thousand years until the destruction of the shrine at Eleusis in 395 c.e. The
“Hymn to Demeter,” the central story of the Eleusinian Mysteries,
tells of Hades’ rape of Persephone. After Persephone returned from the
underworld, Demeter offered the Mysteries to humans. The Mysteries—fruits of the female descent—were secrets known only to initiates
of this ancient cult that continued goddess worship into the Christian
era. In its later forms, the Mysteries became a celebration of Eros
and Psyche, a humanized version of the earlier body of myth.3 Psyche
has relevance for many women: she is a lover (like Aphrodite), a wife
(like Hera), a pregnant mother (like Demeter), and one who descends
and returns from the underworld (like Persephone and Inanna) (Bolen
259). The initiates of the Mysteries were seekers of rebirth from death.
Eros was not simply a beloved; rather, Psyche and the initiate sought
the generative life force. In the ancient Orphic creation myth, Eros, the
son of the goddess Night (a form of the ancient triple goddess) and the
Wind, was hatched from a silver egg floating in the womb of Night.
This ancient image of the cosmic egg of creation attracted Atwood’s
attention at the time she composed most of the poems in Morning in
the Burned House, as her sketches of it at the end of this essay indicate.
Eros was the first-born god, and from him sprang all other gods and
the universe (Graves 11).4 The Eros and Psyche myth was known to
Roman writers such as Apuleius, an initiate of the Mystery Cult of Isis,
whose version is the most familiar to us. The story has been retold in
a number of versions, including Till We Have Faces (1956), the novel
by C. S. Lewis, which is very close to Apuleius’s version.5 It has been
interpreted for modern times by Jungian scholar Erich Neumann, who
stresses the birth of love, incarnate as the female child, from the union
of Eros and Psyche (137–42). Apuleius’s version of the tale, without its
frame story, is translated in Neumann’s book Amor and Psyche.
The tale tells of Amor (“love” in Latin) and Psyche (“soul” in
Greek). Aphrodite, jealous of Psyche’s charms, has asked Amor to
destroy Psyche with his arrow, but instead, distracted by her beauty, he
wounds himself on his own arrow in his attempt. Irresistibly attracted
to her, he visits her at night. Psyche remains ignorant of her lover’s
identity until one night, overcome with curiosity, she holds up a lamp
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and sees that her lover is Amor (Eros), the handsome god of love. Some
hot wax falling from the lamp wakes Eros, who flees. Psyche is determined to find him and consults his mother, but Aphrodite disapproves
of her son’s liaison with a mortal and makes Psyche undertake four
progressively more dangerous tasks ultimately leading to the underworld. In Goddesses in Everywoman, Bolen has provided a map for
woman’s self-realization based on the four tasks that Aphrodite set for
Psyche: the Sorting of Seeds (resistance to despair achieved through
receptive intuition); the Gathering of Golden Fleece (wielding of compassionate power); the Filling of the Crystal Flask (emotional distance
attained through perspective); and the Descent into the Underworld
(learning to say no). At all four stages, an appropriate helper appears
to assist Psyche. These helpers suggest instincts or latent strengths of
the female psyche that await activation (Bolen 257–62).
Atwood’s Morning in the Burned House, published when Atwood
was nearing sixty, leads deeper and deeper, like a stairway into the
underworld. Most of its poems were written while on tour promoting
The Robber Bride, and Atwood noted that she found hotels particularly conducive to writing poetry, since she did not frequent the hotel
bars (“Mellower”). Hotel rooms’ eerie interchangeability may have
encouraged her to shuffle times and places as intertexts, as she does
in “A Pink Hotel in California” from that volume (76–77).6 She took
special care in organizing the book, partly so that some pieces that had
been written before, like “The Loneliness of the Military Historian,”
published in Harper’s magazine in December 1990, where it appeared
in part as a protest against the first Gulf War, could find appropriate
placement.7 Age and infirmity were much on her mind; not only had
she gone through the death of her father but also Graeme Gibson
was recovering from a biopsy and operation in the summer of 1994.8
Early on she collected the poems about her father into one section. As
the fourth, and penultimate, section the book leads up to it and goes
beyond it. The death of the father prompts the poet’s descent and
depression and catalyzes her ultimate rebirth through love in the final,
fifth section of Atwood’s book. Note that while the myth describes
four phases, Atwood’s volume is in five sections, allowing her poem
sequence to move beyond known constructs and open out into an
open-ended visionary dimension.
In this essay, “phase” refers to the myth, while “section” refers
to Atwood’s book. The dramatic monologues in section two create
an effect of psychodrama that rises, at times, to approximate ritual.
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Atwood draws on contemporary performative techniques to enhance
this effect. The strong rhetoric of her dramatic monologues is oral,
colloquial, and persuasive. She takes liberty with the mythic material.
She is irreverent and avoids clichéd versions of classical mythology,
depicting the underworld as a realm of creativity as well as danger.
Rather than referencing Psyche in reverential tones, Atwood’s poems
introduce pop culture stars or burlesque artists voicing psychic truths
in comic deadpan. There is a ghastly aplomb in these darkly humorous poems. The book is in part an elegy not only for Atwood’s father
but also for the patriarchy. But it is much more, and that much more
is particularly directed to women. The world does not stop when one
man, or the power of Man, ceases. At the end of the book, as snow
freezes all things, an old woman is still speaking, becoming a part of
outer space. The crone voices set cackling in an early part of Morning
(the anteroom of the book-as-hospital, as it were, where the father lies
dying) are funny and bawdy, like feminist satyr plays relieving a Greek
tragedy. They are also cautionary tales. They remind us of the dangers
of female sympathy for needy men, a trap that a woman often runs
willingly into and that lets her avoid the hardest task—to discover
what she herself is and wants before she dies. This is a task that, for
the old woman, must no longer be deferred.
Phase I: The Sorting of Seeds
For the first task in the myth, Aphrodite leads Psyche into a chamber
and commands her to sort a heap of seeds—corn, millet, lentils, and
so on—into different piles by nightfall. Even a casual reader would
note the connection of seeds and growth. With the assistance of ants,
Psyche is able to accomplish this impossible task. According to Bolen,
the Sorting of Seeds—the initial stage of the female quest—involves
resistance to despair achieved through receptive intuition. In this stage
a woman must sort out a “jumble of conflicted feelings and competing
loyalties.” This “inward task” involves an honest sifting through of
the woman’s feelings, values, and motives, separating the dross from
the truly significant “seeds” of creative change. This process requires
“staying with” confused situations without acting until clarity emerges
and a woman trusts “the ants.” Depending on the woman, the ants
could be instincts, intuition arising from the unconscious, or logical
analysis and prioritization (Bolen 259–60).
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The first section of Morning takes place in this stage. The poems
present a jumble of emotions that have been ignored for decades by
the speaker, who wakes up to the fact that old age has crept up on her.
“You Come Back” sets the scene, amid dirty tangled sheets (throughout this volume evoking the dreamworld/underworld). The second
poem, “A Sad Child,” recalls unfinished business, the old hurt of not
being the “favorite child.” The third poem, “In the Secular Night,”
shows unfinished business again tugging at the speaker. The draft
version in the Atwood Papers reveals her intent to make age a central
issue. Atwood added the phrase “thirty years later” to the longhand
version to emphasize the passage of time; the book version changes
the thirty to forty, making the issue of age even clearer.9 The next
poem, “Waiting,” calls up the dawning consciousness of future loss as
Atwood’s aging speaker looks back at her childhood self and forward
to the last poem in the book, “Morning in the Burned House,” another
poem-scene of childhood recollected and in this case transfigured. In
the fifth poem, “February,” addressed to her cat, the speaker is still in
bed but knows she must rise up from the frozen torpor of self-pity. In
“Asparagus” she sits at an outdoor café in spring, the season of asparagus, with a man torn between love for two women. Feeling old, she
humorously wonders if she should look like a crone so her advice will
improve, or if she should get a pet lizard. The seventh and last poem in
section I, “Red Fox,” introduces the trickster with its modus operandi
of subterfuge and theft; the fox suggests Atwood’s persona here and
elsewhere (VanSpanckeren, “Humanizing” 103). These poems suggest
a sifting through of old memories, ideas, and belongings, much like the
sorting of feelings and belongings after a death. The seemingly random
process culminates in a recognition of the self as a yet unfulfilled “lean
vixen” crossing the ice, filled with “longing / and desperation” and
“adept at lies,” desperate to “steal something / that doesn’t belong to
her . . . one more chance / or other life” (16–17).
An absence—a poem left out of Morning, “Gathering,”—lies at
the heart of this section and indeed of the whole volume. It was the
original first poem in early stages of the book manuscript. The following reproduces the longhand manuscript draft; words and letters in
parentheses were crossed out, and underlined words were added from
the margins or above the lines in the original.10
the people (I) you know are getting older
A great (thum) unseen thumb (p) is pushing
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gently and relentlessly down on the tops of their heads
and they spread sideways.
They whiten, like raw wood in (the) a (cold) salt wind.
They silver.
Their eyes are no longer (wide pools) surprised & guile-(free)
free blue pools, but (great) small (berries) & peering,
and shiny as black berries
just before frost.
(Not me of course)
Walking into a roomful of them you think
you are in a roomful of (gnomes) gnomework,
of those who were once your friends, transformed
by (such a) some scentless but malignant power to those
puckered dreamhouse versions
Their smiles are Kodak shadows
The door is closing (on you)
& whatever, they ate, said, did
(to set the spell) (smelled) (touched) to get this way
is about to happen to you. (Atwood Papers)
The first title of this poem was “You Wanted a Birthday Poem,” and
its subject, aging, is the thematic heart of the final book. Yet this poem
was left out. In fact, no single poem directly addresses it; rather, all the
poems and the moments they depict are shown to be a part of aging. As
in this poem, old age—its mystery, inevitability, and terrible connection
with death—is kept offstage. One of the book’s strengths is its intertextuality and multiple levels of meaning: had the poem “Gathering” been
left in, the effect would have been mimetic and reductive. The book is
better without it; now the reader must actively encounter aging in its
shifting manifestations.
Phase II: Acquiring Some Golden Fleece
In the myth’s second task Aphrodite orders Psyche to gather wool from
the dangerous horned rams of the sun. These massive creatures aggressively butt against each other in a field. They are deadly and strong
(and of course male). A green reed—something small and flexible that
survives storms that destroy great oaks—helps by giving advice: at
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sundown, time of the moon and darkness, Psyche can pluck strands
of their wool off the brambles. In this way power is acquired and
destruction averted. According to Bolen, this stage involves the gaining
of power (the Golden Fleece) necessary for any woman. If a woman
is not used to competing, she may easily become hurt or cynical and
retreat into a shell. Having clarified her priorities, the female self in
transition needs to use wiles and indirection while her strength and
resolution grow (Bolen 260).
The eight dramatic monologues in Atwood’s section two exhibit
observation and indirection on the battlefield of the gender wars. In
“Miss July Grows Older” an aging woman (seemingly a Playboy centerfold) is devising crone strategies: “what you get is no longer / what
you see” (23). In the second poem, “Manet’s Olympia,” Olympia
thinks, therefore she is: “I, the head, am the only subject / of this
picture” (25). As for “Monsieur Voyeur,” she addresses him as an
object: “You, sir, are furniture. / Get stuffed” (25). In “Daphne and
Laura and So Forth” victimized women with “eight fingers / and a
shell” (27) are working on tricks for survival: “venom, a web, a hat, /
some last resort” (27). In “Cressida to Troilus: A Gift,” the gift—the
woman’s body—is a trick that kills. “Ava Gardner Reincarnated as
a Magnolia” is an old hand at wiles and indirection, “a glass / of
wine or two on the terrace, / bare leg against white trouser” (32). An
example of Bolen’s Aphrodite consciousness, as a human Ava was able
to move in and out of relationships freely, finding sex to be “the joy,”
“that ancient ploy / and vital puzzle, water- / of-life cliché that keeps
things going” (32). The final poems in the sequence portray increasingly powerful female personages. “Sekhmet, the Lion-Headed Goddess of War, Violent Storms, Pestilence, and Recovery from Illness,
Contemplates the Desert in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” recalls
the Virgin Mary’s transformation into a lion gnawing bones in Cat’s
Eye (68), as well as Yeats’s slouching beast in “The Second Coming.”
Sekhmet embodies power without compassion (40–41) and is imagined as a sardonic ancient statue in the Metropolitan Museum with a
crone’s sense of humor: “if it’s selfless / love you’re looking for / you’ve
got the wrong goddess” (40). “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing” is a pivotal poem in this sequence because, like Plath’s “Daddy,”
this curse poem, overflowing with bitter humor, acknowledges female
power. Helen’s whole female identity is squeezed into a sexual role
that she wields like a laser. Like Atwood’s much earlier poem “Siren
Song,” this seductive trickster text draws the reader into a fiery doom
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(VanSpanckeren, “Humanizing” 112). Helen’s objectification by male
voyeurs has dehumanized her and emptied her of all feeling except
rage. The cause of the wars in the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, the
three great epics of Western literature, Helen—like Pandora and Eve
in other foundational myths—is blamed for introducing destruction to
the world. The poem recalls Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” that ends
“Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (Plath
9). Atwood’s final version of the poem ends as follows:
Look—my feet don’t hit the marble!
Like breath or a balloon, I’m rising,
I hover six inches in the air
in my blazing swan-egg of light.
You think I’m not a goddess?
Try me.
This is a torch song.
Touch me and you’ll burn. (36)
Revisions in “Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing” reveal that the
manuscript version originally was entitled simply “Counter Dancing.”
Here and elsewhere in this volume Atwood revises to find titles that
highlight the mythic and archetypal dimensions. For instance, “King
Lear in Respite Care” was originally simply “Respite Care.” “Cressida
to Troilus: A Gift” was originally simply “The Gift.” The wonderfully
dismissive title “Daphne and Laura and So Forth” originally was “The
Origin of Laurel,” referencing the tree. Other changes in “Helen of
Troy . . .” make it more pertinent to women. The first line originally
read, “The world is full of people / who’d tell me I should be ashamed
of myself.” The book version changes “people” to “women.” The first
draft lacked sensory detail. These lines—slightly altered in the final
printed version—were added to the first draft from the margin:
the music smells like foxes,
humid as August, languorous as wilting bows
or crisp as heated metal, searing the nostrils:
the word sex plastered like
neon at belly level.
The reference to the fox suggests the trickster’s wiles. Perhaps unconsciously aware of Plath’s poem, Atwood added “breath or a balloon,
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I’m rising” to the ending; the word “rising” recalls Plath’s “rise”
(Atwood Papers).
Helen’s fiery power derives from her ability to manipulate male
lust, something that she has learned over millennia of counter dancing. Like the fox in section one, she listens to the instructions of the
flexible green reed, as it were, and gathers her shining tufts of Golden
Fleece from brambles in the night. Helen, Sekhmet, and the other
timeless figures of women of section two who hail from art, myth, and
popular culture speak with the humorous, ironic, outraged voices of
crones as they display their wounds and weapons.
Phase III: The Filling of the Crystal Flask
In this task, Aphrodite sets a small crystal flask into Psyche’s hands
and tells her that she must fill it from water flowing from a dangerous
river. This river leaps off a precipice at the world’s summit and falls
to the deepest part of the underworld. The waters have etched deep
marks into the cliffs, and dragons guard them. Psyche despairs, but
an eagle aids the protagonist; it has long-range sight, or perspective,
and it can see overall patterns. Through the eagle’s help, transparency
and objectivity are gained. Bolen sees these waters as an image of
the “circular flow of life.” She interprets the eagle’s aid as “emotional
distance gained through perspective” and speaks of the importance for
women to be mindful and gain an awareness of “what is significant”
(260–61). It is also possible to see in this story of an individual trying
to fill a small flask from overpowering, cascading waters the necessity
of understanding one’s own personal limits and to take from life’s flow
exactly that which one needs, no more and no less, so as not to be
swept away by the universe’s multiplicity and force, imagined as an
incessant and powerful cataract.
The nine poems in the third section raise issues of damage. The
poems do not suggest solutions but instead point out danger areas,
injustice, and dislocation, particularly for women. “Romantic” warns
women against self-sacrifice for men. “Cell” envisions cancer cells that,
like humans, want more life. “Marsh Languages” explores the ways in
which Western dualism and binary opposites (as in computer language
and electronics) have eradicated all other, more organic languages.
“Frogless” explores pollution and extinction. “Half-hanged Mary”
recalls an innocent woman—Atwood’s ancestor—who is hanged for
witchcraft but survives; her victimization turns her into a witch. In
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“Owl Burning” villagers burn another woman for witchcraft. “Down”
envisions victims as unsatisfied ghosts. In the last poem, “Pink Hotel in
California,” the speaker recalls her family cabin in the woods in Canada during World War II, when words like “smoke, gun, boot, oven”
tasted “pure” (76–77). From the perspective of age and the deathly
hotel room with its dresser showing “antique man-bored wormholes,”
Atwood recognizes that no one is innocent or spared: “The fire. The
scattered ashes. The winter forest” (77).
The crystal flask suggests transparency and objectivity, the essence
of the military historian in section three. Changes in “The Loneliness
of the Military Historian,” originally entitled “The Military Historian Speaks Frankly,” reveal some of Atwood’s concern with women
and power. The poem manuscript—a war protest, as noted before—
criticizes women’s traditional roles in war, specifically the idea that
“women should not contemplate war / should not weigh tactics impartially, view either side and denounce nothing” (Atwood Papers). In the
gender wars, men have a vested interest in keeping women emotional
and ignorant of tactics. The rough draft puts these issues up front,
bringing up the speaker, a female military historian, at the end. The
final version begins with her, describes her in more detail, and presents
her as an expert on war. The effect is to empower her, and women. The
revision also makes the poem more effective as a dramatic monologue
(Atwood Papers).
Poems from this section challenge the reader to see with an eagle’s
eye and address real issues—personal, but also historical and ecological—with clarity, the necessary precondition for the older woman’s
spiritual adventures. These adventures may take the form of working
on unresolved personal trauma (as in “Half-hanged Mary”), or the
adventure may be social or political, in which case the older woman
may work in the world, pitting her energy against dragons such as
cancer (“Cell”) and environmental degradation (“Marsh Languages,”
“Frogless”). In any case the adventure will issue from a space of spiritual clarity that opens up after stages of patiently sifting through old
matters and quietly gathering one’s nascent powers.
Phase IV: The Descent into the Underworld
(Learning to Say No)
For the fourth and last test, Aphrodite commands Psyche to descend
to the underworld to fill a small box for Persephone to fill with beauty
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lotion. Psyche fears this last task will end in her death. Again, she is
offered advice, which she heeds. The far-seeing tower advises that she
will encounter pathetic persons who will cry out for her assistance,
but that she must “harden her heart to compassion” three times and
continue on her journey lest she stay in the underworld forever. Psyche
manages to set aside the calls for her aid, thereby exercising choice.
Bolen notes that “many women allow themselves to be imposed on and
diverted from doing something for themselves. They cannot accomplish whatever they set out to do, or what is best for them, until they
say no” (261–62).
The box recalls a casket or an urn for ash, yet it ushers in rebirth:
through negating and reversing the status quo, Psyche gains her authenticity, autonomy, and sense of personal destiny. This alchemy underlies
even the wrenching poems of section four, which comprise a wavering
descent into the underworld during the father’s slow dying. The series
of dreams and memories about the father recall the series of three
persons to whom Psyche must harden her heart lest she also stay in the
underworld. “The Ottawa River by Night” constitutes a great third
dream, one that resolves the lesser dreams in “Two Dreams” and “Two
Dreams, 2.” The poem marshals dualities: the father’s leave-taking and
the speaker’s last glimpse of his spirit, heading down the Ottawa River
in a small boat at night out to a mythical, hoped-for sea of “safe arrivals.” Both the original handwritten manuscript and the printed one
begin, “In the full moon you dream more” (103). Atwood’s original
manuscript ended with references to the moon as well, which were left
out of the final version. Words in parentheses were crossed out and
underlined words were added, all in the longhand draft:
The moon, mystery,
governs illusion. (But) why is that bad?
Master of illusions, they say, of magicians.
It’s only children who are not impressed
When the (egg) dove appears out of pure air.
After all, the moon does that,
night after night, (and is hardly noticed)
it (simply) exists simply here
(this) (a) (oh yes, an illusion, I think, waking.
It takes you a minute, waking,
to decipher where you are
they can see no reason)
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167
it is because it ought to be there.
there is no reason why it shouldn’t be there. (Atwood Papers)
The draft associates the father with the moon and its regenerating
mystery as well as with a magician’s dove (originally an egg, suggesting rebirth and the orphic egg from which Eros, the creator of the
universe, emerged). The moon presides over the whole rough draft,
including the end. Atwood’s final, printed version reverses this optimistic, moon-drenched vision. It leaves us in the dark, with a blank sense
of nothingness and disorientation as of waking in a strange place (as
Hades would be):
Only a dream, I think, waking
to the sound of nothing.
Not nothing. I heard: it was a beach, or shore,
and some one far off, walking.
Nowhere familiar. Somewhere I’ve been before
It always takes a long time
to decipher where you are. (104)
Revision made the poem stronger and more uncompromising; the
death in the draft was described in abstractions and linked with the
moon, while the dark final draft seems to end in the netherworld. Only
sound (raw material of poetry and transformation) remains
as while the speaker waits in like a tower in darkness to find her
bearings.
Phase V: Alchemical Power
The story of Eros and Psyche continues with the return to the upper
world of Psyche, who almost is trapped in the underworld since, giving in to curiosity like Pandora, she opens the casket of beauty ointment, hoping to make herself more attractive to Eros. Eros saves her,
and their divine marriage or hieros gamos symbolically unites heaven
and earth. Psyche is made divine, and the union issues in the birth of
a divine female child named Pleasure. But Apuleius’s story of Eros
and Psyche is a tale within a tale. An old woman is telling the story of
Eros and Psyche to console a young girl who has been kidnapped on
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her wedding day by robbers who hope for a ransom from her parents.
Apuleius’s frame story is a veiled version of Hades’ rape of Persephone;
the inner tale is a humanized version of the myth. The old woman who
tells the tale is from Thessaly, home of witches, Hecate, and the preHellenic mother goddess. Apuleius’s novel ends with his own initiation
into the rite of Isis; the ritual involves a symbolic death, journey to the
underworld moving through four elements, return, and redemption
from death (Neumann 145–47).
Apuleius’s organization, like Atwood’s, consists of a pattern
repeated in several dimensions, including time and space (the world of
the gods, or spiritual rebirth, is imagined as above the world—in space,
as it were—and deathless). Psyche, now immortal, becomes an exemplar of Aphrodite’s alchemical vision: autonomous, she is involved in
a love relationship. She may be understood as the type of a female artist; her immortal child is the creative work. In “alchemical” fashion,
storytelling choreographs movements of the spirit. This alchemical
power is imagined as a result of a long effort to purify the self from
the “base metal”—in contemporary terms, of one’s neuroses and victimization—and gain sufficient traction in the world to freely choose
one’s own destiny. The four stages previously described are a way of
imagining the cycle of growth. The seeds have been sorted and the priorities established. Planted, they will yield life. The wool of the rams
of the sun has become threads woven into patterns fit for use, like a
nest or womb protecting the seed. The waters of life from the crystal
flask water the seed, the crystal suggesting the seed’s spiritual nature.
The descent into the underworld and return recalls the plant driving
its roots downward firmly in many root paths, asserting its place and
right to thrive. From this firm unseen foundation the plant rises and
bears fruit.
The last section is told in a vulnerable human voice, rather than
the voices of mythic or pop culture personae. Having undergone a
figurative descent and depression by accompanying her dead father
to the underworld in her imagination, the speaker has returned with
new, as it were, alchemical powers over dimensions of time and space.
These powers ripen over the last sequence of nine poems; at first the
gift of new vision is frightening, and the speaker is obsessively drawn
to sites that retain traces of unresolved death. Gradually, the poetic gift
is harnessed, issuing in a reevaluation of the past, a new acceptance of
mortality, and a deepened appreciation of the possibilities that remain.
In some ways these poems answer the questions about devastation in
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169
the world that were raised by the third section. This sequence suggests
art’s power to transform life by retelling it with new stories that substitute for the old while retaining their structures. Death and loss cannot
be changed, but they can be transformed in our awareness, and this
transformation has its own invisible power that radiates out in time
and space.
“Vermillion Flycatcher, San Pedro, Arizona” offers a vision of timeless destruction in a streambed after a flash flood (rivers and drowning
here, as in the icy ravine’s stream in Cat’s Eye that flows from the cemetery, suggest death and the past). The bird introduces the possibility of
song; however, it “conjures” and, with its mate, focuses on “rapture.”
The fiery red bird embodies the new alchemical state, the self purified
by fire. The bird suggests the need to follow one’s own dream: “Birds
never dream, being their own. / Dreams, I mean” (107–8). In “The
Moment” the desire to own and conquer is seen as a response to existential terror. “Up” sees the future as outer space. The speaker wakes
up “filled with dread” and cannot get up out of the “crumpled sheets”
like “jungle / foliage”:
What prevents you? The future. The future tense,
immense as outer space.
You could get lost there.
No. Nothing so simple. The past, its density
and drowned events pressing you down . . . (110)
The poem ends with a riddle like a koan that cuts to the heart of the
alchemical vision. One must absolve oneself, reject the toxic devaluation of self that one has introjected:
Now here’s a good one: you’re lying on your deathbed
You have one hour to live.
Who is it, exactly, you have needed
all these years to forgive? (110–11)
This last section of Atwood’s book explores the alchemy of destruction and creation. “Girl Without Hands” imagines a victimized double
of the speaker’s self. Since we victimize ourselves, the victimized part
needs to absolve the victimizer. If she reached out to touch you, despite
her “absent hands,” you would “feel nothing / but you would be /
touched all the same” (113). One needs to be an archaeologist of one’s
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own life, and to touch, and allow oneself to be touched by, aspects of
one’s victimized, buried self lying in one’s own river of the past. The
way back is also the way forward out of depression and stasis. “You
can go no farther than this, / you think, walking forward” (112–13).
In this poem the speaker also forgives herself for surviving the father’s
death. “The Signer” imagines her art in the hands of the signer who
translates Atwood’s poems into sign language like the weaving of destiny by the female fates. In their patterns art, artist, and translator are
practicing
for the place where all the languages
will be finalized and
one (114–15)
This poem restores the “lost syllable for ‘I’ that did not mean separate”
from “Marsh Language” in section three (54). The last four poems
excavate the past and reveal its pain and promise. “A Fire Place”
reminds us that, for the earth, destruction and creation can be all one
process, as, after a burn, new forests emerge. The earth is a model
of transformation, “furrowing, cracking apart, bursting / into flame”
(116–17). “Statuary” envisions the weathering down of the past self
until its atoms merge with universal forces.
“Shapechangers in Winter” introduces the first love poem to the
collection. Its placement suggests that authentic love is only possible
after the authentic, integral self has been activated. The poem’s first
title was “Shapechangers in Snowstorm,” and an alternative title was
“Shapechangers at Solstice.” The final title is simpler and focuses
attention on aging and mortality, seen as winter envisioned as outer
space (both death and the future). The longhand rough draft contains
the kernel of the poem in its beginning. Words in parentheses were
crossed out and added ones underlined:
Through the open window, the wind
comes in & flows around us, nothingness
in motion. the enormous power of what is not there You could read it as
indifference, on the part of the universe or else a relentless
forgiveness.
Holding hands like children,
we step across.
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171
The walls of the house fold themselves down, & the house
turns itself inside out, as a tulip does, its last
full blown
moment of ecstasy, & our candle
flares & goes out, & the only common
sense that remains to us is touch
(skin) (Atwood Papers)
The rough draft continues with a flashback by recalling their shapeshifting pasts as younger selves (that is, younger bodies) and past
moments of intimacy when the two were “lithe as pythons.” The third
stanza of this rough draft was moved to the end of the published version. It imagines the snowstorm and gathering dark of approaching
death that obliterates individuality, and concludes that, despite these
destructive elements,
we will be able to say, when its even darker
than it is now, when its moonless, when the snow is colder,
when it’s darkest and coldest, and candles are no longer
any use to us, and the visibility is zero (and the only sense
that remains is touch,) yes.
It’s still you. It’s still you. (Atwood Papers)
In both rough draft and final version the speaker and her beloved
are at the center of an infinite circle embracing roots and stars, and are
themselves only one shape among younger selves likened to shifting
shapes: bears, foxes, and snakes, which could also be constellations
(there is a movement into the heavens, paralleling Psyche’s attainment
of the divine). However, the draft version ended with the descriptions
of shape-shifting. The final, printed version places the shape-shifting
in the middle. By moving the powerful early stanzas previously quoted
to the end, the love is made to seem a dynamic outcome of the shapeshifting, which is revealed to be deeply transformative. “It’s still you.
It’s still you” now coming at the end resonates like an echo or bell in
the chill snow. The doubled “you” takes on multiple meanings, and
the ego-driven “I” of the first section vanishes. It has taken the speaker
the whole book to arrive at this vision of an Eros, who is envisioned
as a person and also as a creative, empowered force (the two readings
duplicating the two versions of Eros in ancient myth, one abstract and
one concrete). Eros appears at the very scene of past destruction and
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makes it flower, like the reforestation in “A Fire Place.” The final version clarifies this connection: “Taking hands like children / lost in a
six-dimensional / forest, we step across” (124). This other is envisioned
as someone the speaker can hold hands with as she steps across a
threshold into the future—into another dimension—folding the house
of the past down in an image reminiscent of collapsing a carton, one
she had used in much earlier poems, including “Small Cabin” (SP I,
120) and “Two Fires” (SP I, 88–89).
The final poem, “Morning in the Burned House,” presents the
striking image of the speaker as a divine child. Her family is gone, but
their “clothes are still on the hangers”—perhaps they are “off along
the shore” where the dead father’s footsteps crunched on gravel in
“The Ottawa River by Night.” The scene takes place simultaneously
in the past (the house is burning) and in the future (when the “body
I have now” will have “long been over”). It is an image of loss and
also freedom. All times are present, as seen in her “bare child’s feet on
the scorched floorboards,” her “burning clothes,” and “cindery, nonexistent, / radiant flesh. Incandescent” (126–27). The burning child is
a powerful alchemical image of rebirth that illuminates the darkness
of the underworld like a torch. In this last moment of the volume, the
speaker accepts destruction as a part of creation. Time and mortality
are revealed as the burning that consumes her, her childhood house,
the forest, and loved ones. Yet all that is loved and lost is like the dross
that, kindled in the athanor or alchemist’s vessel, creates meaning. The
poem sounds the ancient, elegiac ubi sunt theme: “Where have they
gone to, brother and sister, / mother and father?” The lovely, transitory
nature of life is then celebrated in crystalline detail recalling Vermeer.
Every detail is “clear, / tin cup and rippled mirror.” This poem issues
from an imagined, creative space outside time in which everything is
already lost and yet found “including the body I had then, / including
the body I have now / as I sit at this morning table, alone and happy.”
The sensation of being sufficient in oneself, in the midst of destruction,
is the mark of rebirth. The burning girl is unknowable to the old self,
and the speaker cannot “know if this is a trap or blessing.” This final
poem gestures to a new way of being that may be compared to the
rebirth granted to spiritual initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries and
encoded in later female descent narratives such as that of Eros and
Psyche. The title is a metaphysical pun: mourning becomes morning.
Instead of merely describing a quest into the unknown, the poems
constitute this journey. Text and journey, subjective and objective
Chapter 6: Atwood’s Space Crone
173
reality, upper and underworlds are not sharply defined by modernist
binary oppositions. The speakers are sometimes human, sometimes
animal, sometimes tricksters; their words can be songs, cries, or tricks.
Powerful structures, magical boxes like the one that Psyche was sent
to retrieve from the world of the dead, these poems pose challenges
and trials in themselves. They are active participants, catalysts in the
alchemical process. The poems’ strategies and deployment are experimental and self-questioning, and draw on what poet Kathleen Fraser
has called a female poetic “tradition of marginality.” Fraser rejects
mainstream confessional and rhetorical modes associated with Lowell
and Plath, as well as highly personal poetry associated with feminism;
her influential magazine HOW(ever), which published avant-garde
feminist poetry from 1983 to 1992, furthered spatially, linguistically
oriented, inventive avant-garde feminist poetry that takes its cue from
Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Fraser suggests that feminist poetry,
having been excluded from most canons, tends toward innovation if
it is authentic. However enduring their themes, Atwood’s poems are
similarly innovative and self-aware. Though they are reasonably accessible, they wield postmodern tools and lead readers to no firm conclusions or closures. Instead, they pose new problems and open up new
recognitions. Never programmatic, her poems exist as psychic steps
toward an alchemical vision. In particular, her recent poems about
older women trace pivotal moments, such as the death of a beloved,
and suggest unexplored possibilities and strategies for further creative
development.
In the same folder as the draft manuscripts of the poems that went into
Morning in the Burned House are four small mythological sketches
on lined notepaper torn from a small booklet. They suggest the search
for rebirth of the female through art that lies at the heart of this volume. Since drafts of some of the poems in Morning in the Burned
House, such as “Sad Child,” are written on similar paper and they are
archived together, they may be of interest. At the least, we know that
Atwood was in an artistic phase, having around this time supplied
original watercolors and sketches for Good Bones and Simple Murders
(1994), a compilation of texts for the American market drawn from
her previous works of prose poetry and flash fiction, Murder in the
Dark (1983) and Good Bones (1992).
Part II: Margaret Atwood
174
Figure 1
Figure 2
Chapter 6: Atwood’s Space Crone
175
Figure 1 depicts a female figure with waving hair and a long spiraling tail, who holds the letter a in one hand and an apple in the other, as
if she were displaying the phonetic sound of the first letter of the alphabet. Her scales are sketched like letters, and b, c, d, e, and f trail down
the point of her eel-like tail. This sketch resembles a sketch Atwood
supplied for Good Bones and Simple Murders (58), and Atwood gave
it a title not used in that volume: “The Invention of the Alphabet”
(Wilson 24; Atwood letter to Nan [Talese]). It is relevant to recall that
Aphrodite was associated with apples, especially golden ones, and
pomegranates, as was Persephone (Bolen 233, 263–64).
Figure 2 offers another mythical female figure like a harpy perched
on a large egg. It has many feathers, definite wings, and a fluffy tail;
perhaps it hatched from such an egg. This picture suggests the self nurturing its own rebirth. It is a substantial egg that casts a shadow, and
the harpy, though smaller, is perched assertively on the egg in the pose
of a sphinx. This sketch is similar to one with the unused title “Hen
Brooding on Cosmic Egg,” one of ten illustrations in Good Bones and
Simple Murders (Atwood letter to Nan [Talese]; qtd. in Wilson 24).
Atwood considers “Hen Brooding on Cosmic Egg” to be the “real
title” of this sketch (personal communication with the author, December 13, 2004).
Part II: Margaret Atwood
176
Figure 3
Figure 4
Chapter 6: Atwood’s Space Crone
177
Figure 3 shows a statuesque and pregnant goddess with flowing
hair who holds up a torch or spear in her left hand. She wears what
seem to be boots. A warrior crouches upside-down within her womb
wearing full armor and a helmet, and holding a sword and a shield.
The sketch may be an inversion of the birth of Athena, who was supposed to have sprung full grown and armed from Zeus’s brow. The
idea also reverses Greek myths in which the patriarch Cronos swallowed his children, the Olympian gods, in fear of a prophecy that one
of them would dethrone him. Pregnancy is depicted, in this perhaps
ironic sketch, as a magical and heroic state.
Figure 4 depicts a large egg cracking, sitting on a coiled snake whose
tongue flickers. Both the tongue and the cracking egg open to emit letters or sounds that float into the air, in loosely alphabetical sequence
moving from a to e. The letters are reminiscent of rhyme schemes of
poetry: aaabbcb and so on. They seem to disperse into the sky. In the
bottom right is a coiled snake with a woman’s head that looks back on
a large egg. The snake/woman seems to be nurturing this egg, which
hatches into song.
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Notes
1.Reorderings of tables of contents, Atwood Papers, Thomas Fisher Library, University of Toronto, MS Coll. 200, Box 163, Folder 5.
2. Known as Venus in later Rome, Aphrodite ruled over sexual love and
beauty in ancient Greece and was connected with the Middle Eastern Great Goddess, known as Inanna, Ishtar, and Astarte, who, like Aphrodite, consorted with
the dying god Adonis (Attis). See Graves (28).
3.Numerous scholars, notably the Hungarian classicist Kerenyi, have detailed the interweaving of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the story of Persephone,
and also Pandora, whom he identifies with Hecate, the pre-Greek queen of Hades (232). Bolen follows Erich Neumann in identifying the myth of Amor (or
Eros) and Psyche as the archetypal female quest.
4. Later Greek myth demotes Eros to Aphrodite’s companion and son by an
uncertain father (Graves 17). Roman authors preserve both of these versions. In
one, Eros issues from the egg of Night and is the progenitor of Gaea (Earth) and
Pontus (Sea); in another version Eros is the arrow-shooting son of Venus. This
duality—which enables storytellers to personify the creative force as a human
being—was continued by Bulfinch, whose mid-nineteenth-century version has
been most influential and is still in print today.
5. The Platonic philosopher Lucius Apuleius (c. 124–170 c.e.) included
the tale of Eros and Psyche in the work he titled Metamorphoses, and which
we know as The Golden Ass, where it forms books 4 through 6. Other imitations are by William Morris—in The Earthly Paradise (1868–70)—and Robert
Bridges in 1885 and 1894.
6. This and all subsequent page numbers of poems refer to Atwood, Morning in the Burned House (1995).
7. This poem distills much of the character and vulnerability of Tony, the
female historian interested in warfare in The Robber Bride. Materials including
first publication appear in the Atwood Papers, Box 163, Folder 1.
8. Letters regarding this period are to be found in the Atwood Papers, Box
6, Folder 2.
9.Atwood Papers. References to the manuscript of “Gathering,” as well as
“In the Secular Night” and other poem drafts, are to Box 163.
10.It is beyond the scope of this essay to go into Atwood’s methods of revision or multiple drafts in detail. Discussion is confined to the earliest longhand
manuscripts found in the Atwood Papers, Box 163, Folder 5.
Works Cited
Apuleius. The Golden Ass. 2 vols. Trans. H. E. Butler. Oxford: Clarendon P,
1910. In Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche, trans. Ralph Manheim, 3–53.
1952. Bollingen Series 54. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1956.
Atwood, Margaret. The Blind Assassin. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
2000.
Chapter 6: Atwood’s Space Crone
179
———. Cat’s Eye. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1988.
———.“Democracy: Use It or Lose It.” Acceptance Speech for 2003 Radcliffe
Medal, to the Radcliffe Association. Cambridge, MA, June 6, 2003. Excerpted in Harvard Journal, July–August 2003: 65.
———. Fax to Kathryn Van Spanckeren, Dec. 13, 2004.
———. Good Bones and Simple Murders. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday,
1994.
———. Interlunar. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1984.
———. Letter to Nan [Talese], February 28, 1994.
———. “A Mellower Margaret Atwood.” Interview with Jenny Jackson. Ottawa Citizen, February 5, 1995.
———. Morning in the Burned House. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
———. Murder in the Dark: Short Fictions and Prose Poems. Toronto: Coach
House Press, 1983.
———. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. New York: Anchor,
2002.
———. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 2003.
———. The Robber Bride. New York: Nan. A. Talese/Doubleday, 1993.
———. Selected Poems [SP]. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1976.
———. Surfacing. New York: Popular Library, 1976.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.
Beran, Carol. “Strangers within the Gates: Margaret Atwood’s Wilderness Tips.”
In Wilson, Textual Assassinations, 74–87.
Bolen, Jean Shinoda. Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women.
1984. New York: Harper Colophon, 1985.
Bulfinch, Thomas. Myths of Greece and Rome. Vol. 1 of The Age of Fable, 1855.
New York: Viking Penguin, 1979, 1981.
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 4th ed. Washington, DC:
American Psychiatric Association, 1994.
Fisher, Helen. The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They Are
Changing the World. New York: Random House, 1999.
Fraser, Kathleen. “The Tradition of Marginality.” In Translating the Unspeakable: Poetry and the Innovative Necessity, 25–38. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama
P, 2000.
Friedrich, Paul. The Meaning of Aphrodite. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
Graves, Robert. Greek Myths. London: Penguin, 1981.
“Hymn to Demeter.” In The Homeric Hymns. Trans. Charles Boer. Irving, TX:
Spring Publications, 1979.
Kerenyi, C. The Gods of the Greeks. 1951. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992.
Le Guin, Ursula. “The Space Crone.” In Dancing at the Edge of the World, 3–6.
New York: Grove/Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989.
Lewis, C. S. Till We Have Faces. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956.
Neumann, Erich. Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine.
Trans. Ralph Manheim. Bollingen Series 54. New York: Pantheon Books,
1956.
Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus.” In Ariel, 6–9..New York: HarperPerennial, reprint 1999.
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VanSpanckeren, Kathryn. “Humanizing the Fox: Atwood’s Poetic Tricksters and
Morning in the Burned House.” In Wilson, Textual Assassinations, 102–20.
———. “The Trickster Text: Teaching Atwood’s Works in Creative Writing
Classes.” In Approaches to Teaching Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and
Other Works, ed. Sharon Wilson, Thomas Friedman, and Shannon Hengen,
77–83. New York: Modern Language Association, 1996.
Weissman, M. A., and M. Olfson. “Depression in Women: Implications for
Health Care Research.” Science 269 (1995): 799–801.
Wilson, Sharon. “Fiction Flashes: Genre and Intertexts in Good Bones.” In Wilson, Textual Assassinations, 18–41.
———, ed. Margaret Atwood’s Textual Assassinations. Columbus: The Ohio
State UP, 2003.
Young, Serenity, ed. Introduction to An Anthology of Sacred Texts By and About
Women. New York: Crossroad, 1993.
P art III
Spiritual Adventuring by
Other Contemporary Women Writers
C hapter 7
“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”
Fay Weldon’s Elder Fairy Tale
R oberta R ubenstein
Like a number of Fay Weldon’s female protagonists, Felicity Moore
of Rhode Island Blues is the veteran of several unhappy marriages
and a number of pregnancies, including daughters both legitimate and
illegitimate, as well as two abortions. She has lived an unintentionally adventurous life, including stretches as the wife of a poor chicken
farmer who, inconveniently, had another wife; as a “good-time” girl
on a Georgia riverboat; and as the wife of a wealthy, closeted gay man.
At times she frets about her physical appearance, particularly when she
discovers that she is attracted to a man considerably her junior in age.
During the course of the narrative, Felicity rediscovers romance, love,
and commitment to her own future as she opens herself to exploration of a new relationship. Rhode Island Blues incorporates several
fairy-tale motifs, including a wicked stepmother (or two), a figurative
prince who frees the figurative princess from her prison, and a happilyever-after ending.
There is a crucial distinction, however, between Felicity and Weldon’s other female protagonists: she is eighty-three years old. When the
novel begins, Felicity feels—after four years of widowhood following
the death of her third husband—that life holds few appealing options
for a woman her age. She is, as she phrases it, “bored to hell. I keep
waiting for something to happen but happenings seem to have run
out. Is it my age?” (3). Although she is economically independent, she
concedes after suffering a mild stroke that she’s “too old to live alone”
(7). Following a conventional script for women of her age and circumstance—but also guided by an auspicious hexagram from the Chinese
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Part III: Other Contemporary Women Writers
book of wisdom, the I Ching—she proceeds to sell her house and move
to a retirement/nursing home, the upscale Golden Bowl Complex for
Creative Retirement in Rhode Island.
Unlike most of the residents of the Golden Bowl,1 Felicity is far from
“elderly” in either behavior or attitude. Not only is she still attractive
and attentive to her physical appearance, but she also retains a vital
sense of life’s possibilities, despite the attempts of the punitive and
ironically named Nurse Dawn, the wicked stepmother of the nursing
home, to infantilize residents by undermining their sense of personal
independence. Through the unctuous nurse, Weldon directs a healthy
measure of satire toward the hypocrisies of retirement “homes.” The
tone of the place where residents are known as “Golden Bowlers” (35)
is one of relentless cheer, though not without a satirical edge: “We like
everyone to be happy, our cups half-full not half-empty” (233). Its
philosophy is superficially based on Jungian psychology: residents,
who are carefully selected for their robust health and probable long­
evity, are encouraged to pursue self-improvement and spiritual growth
because “the soul needs nourishment as much as does the body” (47).
Once they have taken up residence, their families are “encouraged
to hand over complete responsibility. Over-loving relatives could be
more damaging to an old person’s morale, more detrimental to the
Longevity Index, than those who were neglectful” (15). Nurse Dawn
cynically observes to herself that “as for Felicity, sooner or later something would happen to bring her to her senses and a proper sense of
gratitude. A hip or a knee that needed replacing, arthritis in the hands,
a disabling loss of memory, and she would cease to be independent:
she would become like everyone else in the twilight of their days, and
not think herself so special. Time was on Nurse Dawn’s side: the great
advantage the young have over the old” (106).
Ironically, it is only after Felicity gives up living independently that
she begins to challenge the implications of Nurse Dawn’s cynical view
of old age. At a funeral she attends soon after moving to the retirement
home, she is attracted to a thrice-married widower, William Johnson, a
man eleven years her junior who also has an unorthodox and colorful
personal history. Like women of any age who are drawn toward a new
romantic relationship, Felicity must examine her own emotions and
erotic feelings and evaluate the authenticity of her suitor’s attentions.
Through her growing attraction to William, Felicity recognizes that
“what she’d been missing . . . was the consciousness of some secret
level of the self where things more important than the rational mind
Chapter 7: “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”
185
would ever know took place, to do with the wheeling galaxies and the
purposes of the life force” (109). In support of Felicity’s exploration
of romance and the degree of control she—or anyone—actually has
over her destiny, Weldon interpolates at various points in the narrative
views from Carl Jung and the I Ching regarding chance, synchronicity,2 and the relationship between the outer and the inner life. The first
instance of synchronicity is the fact that Felicity’s vagrant, estranged
stepson, at whose funeral she meets William Johnson, was married to
William’s stepdaughter.
Aspects of the inner life are suggested through the “mirror on the
wall,” which Felicity first encounters when she moves into the room
of a recently deceased resident of the Golden Bowl. Weldon’s presentation of the mirror’s function is key to the novel as a whole: the looking
glass may distort what it reflects; additionally, it may reveal inner as
well as outer states of the subject reflected from its sometimes duplicitous surface. As Weldon suggests through Felicity’s reflections (in both
senses of the word), one can control the meaning of the mirror’s images
through a firm grasp of one’s psychic or spiritual identity. The doctor who manages the retirement home is superstitious about mirrors:
“supposing the new occupant looked in the mirror and saw the former occupant looking out. . . . [Mirrors] retained memory; they had
their own point of view” (17). Indeed, when Felicity first looks into the
mirror in her room, she has a brief but disturbing vision of an “elderly
man” (72) returning her glance; shocked, she looks away. A second
glance into the mirror reassuringly reveals her own image. “That of
course was bad enough. You looked into a mirror as a young woman
and your reflection looked out at you as one who was old. So what,
honestly, was the big deal if the one looking out had changed sex as
well? The shock of the stranger in the mirror was with you every time
you looked into one. So why worry? . . . Better to conclude that the
unexpected face in the mirror was a projection of one’s own fears
rather than some occult phenomenon” (72–73).
The uncanny “stranger in the mirror” whose image is quickly
replaced by a more familiar one is a phantasm—a psychic projection
of something unfamiliar because it is not acknowledged as “self.”3
As Felicity’s relationship with William Johnson begins to take on the
signs of romantic courtship, she distances herself from reflections of
her aging body, preferring to regard the mirror as a “magic mirror”
that “threw back your soul to you, and not your looks.”4 Recalling
the authoritative looking glass in the fairy tale of Snow White, Felicity
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silently pleads, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who deserves love most of
all? Me, me, me. Just one last time. Please” (120). She also recognizes
the mirror’s variability, a reflection of her own varying states of mind
and feelings. Despite the fact that she is chronologically an octogenarian, “It didn’t feel like it, emotionally: apparently you learned nothing
when it came to affairs of the heart. You started afresh in folly every
time. Look in the mirror, and you always saw something different;
sometimes you saw the spirit of yourself, perfectly fresh and youthful:
sometimes you saw corrupted flesh” (121). At one point, the mirror
reminds her that at her age she would be foolish to regard herself as
among “the fairest of them all”; moreover, “if that was what the mirror did ever tell you, everyone hated you: you became wicked witch to
Snow White. And besides, it didn’t last: good looks were all anxiety
and disappointment: she had given up worrying years ago” (188).
Later, as Felicity and William move tentatively toward sexual intimacy,
their eyes are truly mirrors into their souls. “He leaned over her, his old
eyes looking into her yet older ones, into a mirror which threw back
only pleasant sights, livened by the unexpected” (165).
Over the course of the narrative, the changing reflections in the
looking glass may be understood to illustrate Felicity Moore’s psychological and spiritual growth. According to Kathleen Woodward,
who theorizes a “mirror stage” in old age that is complementary to
the Freudian and Lacanian “mirror stage” of infancy, “in the old age
our culture has constructed we desire our mirror image to function as
does trompe l’oeil, to reveal itself precisely not as what it so shockingly
presents to us as ourselves. . . . The I or ego which is developed in the
mirror stage of infancy is structured precisely to resist the anxiety of
bodily fragmentation. In old age, with one’s position reversed before
the mirror, the ego finds it more difficult to maintain its defenses” (68).
The reflections in Felicity’s mirror also function as reflectors of the
stages of her spiritual growth, evolving from the image of Other—a
male “stranger in the mirror”—to Self: a woman who comes to know
and act upon her deepest inner knowledge and intuition. Given the
Jungian allusions that appear elsewhere in the novel, the male figure
may also be understood as the animus, the complementary double/
opposite whose integration into the female personality is a necessary
step toward spiritual wholeness.5
Only once in the narrative does a mirror reflection unexpectedly
lead Felicity to regard not her body image but a mental image—the
most painful memory of her life. Significantly, the process of recovering
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187
that deeply buried memory occurs at the point when the relationship
between Felicity and William has reached its moment of greatest risk.
William has cautioned Felicity that there is something about him that
she must know before she responds to his proposal of marriage. He
drives her to a Native American–operated casino in the Connecticut
woods whose turrets and towers suggest a fairy-tale castle created by
Disney. There, he admits to her that this is his other love: gambling.
Instead of reacting directly, Felicity finds her attention drawn
inward to the memory of a time shortly before her mother died during
the 1918–19 influenza epidemic. Though she cannot remember her
mother’s name, she recalls her mother’s mirrored dressing table, which
contained several personal items invested with powerful emotional
associations. In particular, she recalls her mother’s hairnets, which she
would “stretch . . . between her hands and look at the world through
them: a fine crisscross of brown between her and reality, distorting it
but softening it.” Recalling her mother’s cautionary words that the nets
were delicate and could be easily broken, Felicity realizes that she has,
until now, forgotten her mother’s name because she had “gone away
and left her child without protection. . . . Sylvia, of course, that was her
name. Then Lois had taken over and within a day the dressing table
was cleared and there was a stepmother in her mother’s bed” (196).
In some ways Felicity has continued to view the world through the
distorting but softening scrim of her long-vanished mother’s hairnet.
William, noting the tears on Felicity’s cheeks, fears that the revelation of his gambling habit has distressed her. She responds, “I’m crying
because my mother died” (196). Psychologically, it is as if the new possibility of love and trust and intimacy has prompted Felicity to allow
into consciousness the long-repressed memory of the lost first object
of love—the mother who abandoned her through death—and to make
peace with the absence that so colored her subsequent life. Much of
what happened after her mother’s death was directly related to that
incalculable loss, including emotional abuse at the hands of the wicked
stepmother who replaced her dead mother in her father’s bed and her
rape at the age of fifteen by her stepmother’s brother, whose denial of
responsibility was believed while Felicity’s version of events was scornfully dismissed.6
Readers learn such details of Felicity’s story incrementally, in part
through her own eyes and in part through those of her well-intentioned
but at times self-serving granddaughter. Sophia, a thirty-two-year-old
film editor based in London, is—like a number of Weldon’s younger
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protagonists—in flight from the past but, ironically, far more preoccupied with it than is Felicity. Ambivalently, Sophia both fears emotional
commitment and longs for attachment, wishing for the family that she
never had. Though she has a tenuous relationship with the Hollywood
director of several of the films that she edits, she is reluctant to admit
to a significant emotional attachment, telling herself instead that Harry
Krassner merely sleeps in her bed after their collaborative work on his
film ends each day to save himself the inconvenience of staying in a
hotel. Thus, belatedly responding to a request urging her to come to
the United States to see her ailing grandmother who has just suffered
a mild stroke, Sophia wonders, “Perhaps I had come not so much to
rescue Felicity as to escape emotional entanglement” (23).
Sophia’s strategy for distancing herself from emotional experiences
is film: not only does she edit films professionally but she also escapes
into them, finding them less messy and much more reliable than real
life. As she phrases it, “Real life is all subtext, never with a decent
explanation, no day of judgement to make things clear” (4). Later, she
elaborates on this distinction, claiming that “[r]eal life is unsatisfactory, there’s no resolving anything properly . . . murder doesn’t always
out: the only ‘end’ is death. Films at least offer resolutions and answers,
and solutions, the boring bits edited out” (153). Pertinently, she is currently working on films with such suggestive wish-fulfillment titles as
Tomorrow Forever and Hope against Hope. She often recasts her own
and others’ experiences in terms of movie classics in which the outcome
is clear.
Like a good film editor, Sophia attempts to splice together and thus
reconstruct her family history based on details she uncovers. First, to
her surprise, she learns from Felicity—who has determined that she has
reached the age where she is “old enough to speak the truth” (1)—that
her grandmother had an illegitimate child “before I had your mother. . . .
That was in London, back in the thirties. I wasn’t married. That made
me a bad girl. They made me keep the baby for six weeks, and breastfeed, then they took her away, put her out for adoption” (53). The
orphaned Sophia, curious and longing for other relatives, engages a
private detective agency to find out what happened to Felicity’s child.
She discovers that the child—her great-aunt Alison, who is now in
her sixties—lives in a nursing home near London; incapacitated by
Alzheimer’s disease, she can offer Sophia little in the way of family connection or insight. Indeed, real life offers a less satisfactory denouement
to this particular strand of family history than would a film version.
Having learned the sordid crisis of her grandmother’s adolescence,
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Sophia imagines Felicity’s rape by her step-uncle as a “film narrative
in [her] head” (156) that concludes with “Cut away to long shot. You
know the dismal rest” (157).
Sophia also locates her grandmother’s younger half-sister, Lucy,
who is able to supply more details about Felicity’s youth. Through
her, Sophia learns that Felicity’s stepmother, Lois, had totally rejected
the pregnant Felicity. In a response typical of the time, she blamed the
victim, regarding her pregnant stepdaughter as “a moral imbecile . . .
dirty, disgusting and lewd.” According to Lucy, Lois threw Felicity out
of the house and deposited her at the door of a home for unwed mothers “as if she were an abandoned baby and not an abandoned mother”
(158). There, on her fifteenth birthday, Felicity gave birth to Alison
and soon afterward gave her up for adoption. As Sophia comments,
“the truth turned out to be even more dramatic than I would have
dared suppose, and being reported by a seventy-five-year-old out of
the memory of the child she once was, had already been conveniently
turned into a shaped narrative: a tragedy, as it happened. . . . [A]
happy ending for Felicity was not within the scheme of her universe”
(144). In an observation that underscores the novel’s fairy-tale motifs
as well as its deliberate attention to the constructed “story” of any life,
Sophia concludes, “The Fates have a way of doling out the same hand
of cards to a woman, over and over. The cackling sisters had decided
that Felicity was to get some pretty nice cards sprinkled with a few
really nasty ones bound to mess the others up. They sent along a Fairy
Godmother to the christening to give looks, charm, energy, courage,
wit—then took away her parents, gave her Lucy’s mother Lois for a
wicked stepmother, brought Lois’s brother Anton into the household,
[and] obliged her to give away her perfect baby” (145).7
The other woman who links Sophia to her grandmother is Felicity’s
legitimate daughter from her first marriage: Sophia’s mother, Angel,
who died by suicide in a mental hospital at the age of thirty-five when
her only child was ten. Sophia still nurses a sense of maternal loss and
emotional emptiness. She feels as if the “sepulchral figure” of her mad
mother “stands between [herself] and Felicity, damming up the flow of
family feeling” (2). As Sophia delves more deeply into the secrets of
her family history, she discovers other relatives she never knew she had
and realizes that her feelings of abandonment are part of a repeating
pattern: just as Sophia’s own mother died during her early childhood,
Felicity’s mother died of influenza when Felicity was an even younger
child.
Later, Sophia discovers still another twist in her tangled family
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history: Felicity’s first husband was not the father of her child (Sophia’s
mother). Rather, when Felicity married an American GI based in England during World War II, she was pregnant by a folk singer who
lived in London’s Soho district. She went to Georgia to live with her
American husband on what he told her was his plantation, which in
fact was a dirt-poor chicken farm. To add insult to injury, he already
had another wife as well as another child. Though Sophia is fascinated
by these discoveries about her family history, Felicity wishes that her
granddaughter would leave well enough alone rather than dredging up
additional details of her painful and at times sordid past.
What prompts Felicity’s orientation toward the present—and the
future—is her developing relationship with William Johnson. Others,
including Felicity’s former neighbor with the comically ironic name of
Joy, are convinced that William is simply a con man and “sponger”
(133), the kind of man who preys on susceptible older women and
whose real interest is their bank accounts. At times Felicity herself worries about William’s motives, even as—in the habit of a much younger
woman—she orders by mail cosmetics, face creams, and lingerie that
she hopes will make her appear more attractive. The two meet every
day through an arrangement that resembles a secret assignation: Felicity persuades the man who is employed as Joy’s chauffeur to secretly
convey William from his retirement home in nearby Mystic, Connecticut, to hers each day while Joy is napping. The brief afternoon visits
temporarily elude even the watchful eyes of the grim Nurse Dawn and
the staff of the Golden Bowl. In another comic touch, the chauffeur, a
Yugoslavian refugee, marvels at the liaison he helps to facilitate: “Only
in the United States . . . would the old have health and energy enough
thus to complicate their lives. It gave him a sense of future. He might
even give up smoking[,] the better to fit in” (119–20).
In William’s loving eyes, Felicity feels herself alive again, even as
she recognizes the risk and the impermanence of such feelings: “But
while it lasted, how magic was the exhilaration, the exultation, the
sense of being properly alive. Just one more time, and this time let me
get it right. True love. Could it be that if you just hung round for long
enough, your faith intact, it happened? When you least expected it,
there it was at last.” By contrast, in the presence of the life-squelching
Nurse Dawn, Felicity feels “old and useless again, and slightly dotty,
since that was how Nurse Dawn saw her” (124).
The most delicately realized dimension of Weldon’s elder fairy tale
is her treatment of sexuality, which she renders with both sensitivity
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191
and genial humor. When Felicity first returns to the Golden Bowl after
having met William, she is in such “high spirits” that Nurse Dawn is
concerned, fearing that such “inappropriate emotions could indicate
the onset of dementia” (103). Later, Felicity ponders the nature of
desire at her age, concluding that “lust . . . was not the prerogative of
the young: as you got older desire presented itself in a different form . . .
as a restless sense of dissatisfaction, which out of sheer habit you had
the feeling only physical sex would cure. It was generated in the head,
not the loins, the latter these days admittedly a little dried up, and
liable to chafing rather than the general luscious overflowing which
had characterized their prime” (108).
For three weeks after their first meeting, Felicity and William, separated by a table in Felicity’s room that signifies the “no-man’s land
between desire and fear of consequences” (124), “debrief” (129) each
other by sharing details of their histories, interests, and tastes. As they
move gingerly toward intimacy, Felicity realizes the awkward path they
must navigate: “Bad enough at twenty to work out how to proceed
from physical distance to physical intimacy: how to move from the
chair to the sofa, from the sofa to the bed: fifty, sixty years on and the
problem was back again” (130). Along with such strategic difficulties,
they must face the limits of their aging bodies. William’s hands are, like
Felicity’s own, “wrinkled and liver-spotted” (131).
Further, Felicity wonders whether the “electrical charge” she feels
when William first sits next to her can be trusted: “She could be wrong
about it: he could be teasing her, manipulating her cruelly. She could
be making a fool of herself. Maybe all this was in her head?” Nonetheless, she proposes that they “lie together on her bed” for the innocuous reason that “sitting up straight for so long quite tires [her] out.”
Immediately, she feels that she has been too hasty. William, revealing
his own anxiety, responds, “I’m an old man. I’ll only disappoint you”
(131), and prepares to leave. Ultimately, however, they overcome the
almost comic awkwardness of the situation and end up on Felicity’s
bed. Remaining fully clothed like timid adolescents on the brink of
their first sexual experience, they confide to each other further details
of their earlier lives and loves, “flesh touching, albeit the other side of
fabric. The denim of his jeans, the silk of her skirt: her legs still long
and shapely, the skin no longer taut, blotchy; a blue network of veins
beneath the ankles. How much did it matter? What had love ever been
about? The spirit or the flesh?” (133). On a later occasion, William’s
hand sometimes “strayed to [Felicity’s] breast, to find out more about
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it, and for once she wished she had her former body back: it was as if
now the power of her will was obliged to sustain her physical existence
and keep proving it: whereas once the body had run off so boldly with
the self, taking over: the firm bosom, the bouncy flesh, flying ahead of
the will, having to be restrained” (165).
At one point, distressed by her feeling of entrapment not only
within the confining and life-denying rules of the Golden Bowl but also
within her aging body, Felicity laments, “as you got older the sense
that the spirit was incarcerated in the body became more intense. . . .
[However], it was not the Golden Bowl which kept you in one place
against your will, it was your body, now reluctant to run, jump, and
skip” (240). Sex at her and William’s ages, she concludes, must be
understood more as “a token of esteem rather than a source of overwhelming physical pleasure. While she wasn’t looking it had ceased to
be an all-consuming need” (261).
The fairy-tale romance between Felicity and William has its share
of doubts and darker moments. Felicity wonders whether falling in
love is simply “a strategy for postponing thoughts of death and the
physical and mental decline that led up to it” (245). The decision
to marry, a major decision at any age, looms especially large as she
ponders what would justify such a commitment for a woman in her
eighties. Moreover, like Felicity herself, the reader may wonder how to
weigh William’s gambling addiction. Though he claims he knows when
to quit, he pursues his compulsive pastime on an almost daily basis.
According to him, it is a form of playing with chance, of “rolling with
destiny” (199). Felicity, with a generosity of spirit conferred by age,
ultimately concludes that she has her own less admirable qualities as
well and that William’s gambling is a form of entertainment that does
not take anything away from her. Like any other entertainment, “it
was all there was left to do, at the close of life. And who cared about
the money?” (199). Gambling is simply another form of risk-taking;
according to William, “the greater the risk, the higher the reward”
(198). Indeed, that view shapes Felicity’s decision to embrace the rare
opportunity that life offers her. Welcoming the unexpected “exhilaration of true love” (133) at the age of eighty-three, she feels “lucky,”
despite the “share of bad luck that had piled up in the first twenty
years” (246) of her life.
The deepest point of Felicity’s spiritual journey is her recognition
that her decision to marry William is not only a celebration of the
life force but also a door opening to continued inner growth and the
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193
discovery of the elemental meaning of experience, even at—indeed,
despite—her advanced age. As she phrases what she has discovered
during her romantic courtship with William, “The old understood better than the young that the foundation of the earth was composed of
good and evil, no matter how you struggled to see it in terms of money
and sex and luck. The trouble was the old had no words, no language,
no real remembrance; what afflicted the soul in the end afflicted the
body. The old peered out of rheumy eyes, dimmed by too much exposure to the truth, deafened by a lifetime of lies, bent by the burden of
guilt. . . . Age itself was evil, and there was no escaping it. . . . But what
else can you do? How else express what you have learned of life . . .?”
(271).
The names of Weldon’s protagonist, like those of other characters
in the novel, amplify the fairy-tale themes: “Felicity” connotes a pleasing manner as well as something that causes or produces happiness,
while “Moore” suggests Felicity’s desire to live more fully than is conventionally sanctioned for women of her advanced age. Together these
meanings enhance the depiction of a character who is rare not only in
Weldon’s fiction but also in contemporary fiction: one who not only
can admit to herself, despite her age, that “she did miss being in love”
(108) but who emphatically resists the cultural scripts of aging that
assume erotic and emotional diminution.8 In Rhode Island Blues Weldon provides astringent reminders of the more conventional view. In
particular, Felicity’s envious (and utterly joyless) seventy-nine-year-old
neighbor, Joy, offers a jaundiced view of heterosexual relationships.
The veteran of four marriages, she has concluded that “men changed
on the day you married them: though they always claimed it was you
that did” (90). Convinced that she has little control over what comes
her way, Joy regards life as “a long road uphill; you travelled in a
vehicle driven by others; it was better to appreciate the scenery than
to speculate about what was going to happen when you reached the
top and looked down the other side. One of Joy’s grandsons played
computer games: she’d seen how you could topple down over the edge
into a brilliant white nothingness: it had really scared her. These days
she saw her own life like this, something almost virtual, perched on the
edge of an abyss” (89). Revealingly, Joy is especially critical of Felicity’s
romantic relationship with William in particular and with erotic desire
in older people in general: “People of that age have no business having sex. It’s too upsetting for those around. . . . It’s shaming, embarrassing and humiliating” (163). By contrast, through Felicity, who is
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emotionally rejuvenated and empowered by her willingness to take
the risk of intimacy, Weldon suggests that, for those who retain their
imaginations along with a measure of wisdom and some flexibility,
love knows no chronological limits.
Even the emotionally repressed Sophia is affected by Felicity’s joie
de vivre. Through Felicity’s story, which she has successfully pieced
together, she comes to see that “one tends to write off women in their
mid-eighties as simply hanging around until death carries them away.
One is wrong” (140). In her head she hears the voice of a benevolent fairy godmother—her grandmother, Felicity—articulating the lifeaffirming truth that shapes Weldon’s fable: “Take nothing seriously. It’s
all fairy tale” (312, emphasis in original).
However, there is one last twist to the fairy tale. On her final visit
to her grandmother, Sophia makes the error of bringing along her two
newly discovered cousins: the adult children of Felicity’s illegitimate
daughter, Alison. It soon becomes apparent that Guy and Lorna are far
more interested in Felicity’s assets—namely, a painting by Utrillo that
she received years before from her wealthy second husband in a divorce
settlement—than in the recovery of family ties. Guy asserts to Nurse
Dawn his view that it is foolish to leave “a batty old woman in charge
of a major work of art, let alone her being in thrall to an unscrupulous
gambler” (315). Nurse Dawn, hardly Felicity’s ally, suggests that the
best strategy would be to have Felicity declared incompetent so that
Guy can be named her legal guardian. It is not surprising that Felicity
sees a resemblance between Nurse Dawn and her cruel stepmother,
Lois, who had disowned her so many years ago. As she remarks to
William, “How strange to meet up with her again, after all this time”
(271). Felicity also accurately senses that Guy and Lorna—whom she
believes must be the evil Lois’s grandchildren rather than hers—hope
to grab her one valuable possession, her Utrillo. She persuades Sophia
to help her hide the painting. Together removing it from the wall of
Felicity’s room, they wrap it in a quilt and convey it to temporary
safety in an empty gardener’s shed outside the retirement home, to be
reclaimed at the appropriate time. When Guy and his sister come to the
Golden Bowl the next day to visit Felicity, they are shocked to discover
that both she and the Utrillo have vanished.
Felicity, more interested in the future than the past, further surprises
her own granddaughter by promptly selling the valuable painting. Life
itself is a gamble, never more so than at her age: she has decided to
take her chances with William. “If she divided the money from the
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195
Utrillo and what she already had into ten, that gave them $400,000
a year to see them out. This was the amount William lost annually, if
you averaged out the winning and the losing years. They would spend
their days gambling at Foxwoods; and if they lost there would be no
sorrow, because they expected to, and if they won they could rejoice”
(325).
Sophia, inspired by her grandmother’s spirited escape from the
retirement home to elope with William, returns to London with a
renewed sense of possibility and expansion in her own life. Over the
course of her encounters with Felicity, she acquires at least a modicum
of the wisdom signaled by her name and a new orientation that, like
her grandmother’s, is more focused on the future than the past: “I saw
that I had extra decades to go, more than I thought. Life elongated
before me. I saw it in my head as a kind of special effect . . . paleish [sic]
green and glowing and stretching into the distance, only slightly uphill:
a path. Really there was no hurry to get everything right” (325).
What adds depth and resonance to Weldon’s affirmative exploration
of love and romance in her old but far from elderly female protagonist
is the position of Rhode Island Blues within the author’s own oeuvre.
Now in her mid-seventies herself, Weldon is the author of twenty-six
novels. Although her more recent narratives focus satirically on the
vagaries of love, marriage, sexual infidelity, and wives’ fantasies of
revenge, her early novels published during the 1970s depict the hard
lives of women during the peak years of courtship, marriage, and
childbearing as they endure various aspects of the “female condition.”9
A female character in one novel of that period, Down Among the
Women, laments, “There is nothing more glorious than to be a young
girl and there is nothing worse than to have been one” (6). In novels
that reflect their moment in the history of unequal relations between
the sexes, anatomy is indeed destiny: women have little control over
either their bodies or their fates; female friendships are fragile because
women are economically and emotionally dependent on men. Yet love
is fickle and men are neither reliable nor faithful. As a female character
from Praxis, another of Weldon’s novels from the same period, representatively phrases it, “We are betrayed on all sides. Our bodies betray
us, leading us to love where our interests do not lie. Our instincts betray
us, inducing us to nest-build and procreate—but to follow instinct is
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not to achieve fulfillment, for we are more than animals. . . . Our brains
betray us, keeping one step, for the sake of convenience, to avoid hurt,
behind the male” (205–6).10
Several decades later, in Rhode Island Blues, Sophia—a self-sufficient and economically independent professional woman who is a
clear beneficiary of the women’s movement—reflects on the restricted
lives of women of her grandmother’s generation, acknowledging that
“even a couple of decades into the [twentieth] century only a very
exceptional woman could earn a living wage, other than on her back”
(144). Regarding her view of female experience in the decades before
feminism, Weldon commented to an interviewer:
In the fifties and sixties we women thought if we were unhappy
it could only be our fault. We were in some way neurotic, badly
adjusted—it was our task to change ourselves to fit the world. We
would read Freud, Helene Deutsch, Melanie Klein (these last two at
least being moderately relevant to our female condition), bow our
heads in shame in the face of our penis envy, and teach ourselves
docility and acceptance. As the seventies approached and we failed
to achieve these ends, the great realization dawned—we must change
not ourselves but the world! It was not we who were at fault, with our
mopes and sulks and hysteria and murderous pre-menstrual rages, it
was the world. The world was male. It was only natural, living as we
did in a patriarchal society, that we would behave in such a way. So
we stopped placating (that is to say smiling) and set out, scowling,
to change to world. We worked upon that, not upon ourselves. We
become radical separatist, lesbian feminists, or subsections of such,
and weren’t really nice at all. We stamped hard on male toes, and we
liked each other but it was a rare man who liked us. And if he did we
despised him for his softness. (“Changing Face” 193–94)
In contrast to virtually all of her earlier female characters, in Felicity Moore of Rhode Island Blues Weldon has created an exuberant,
risk-taking, significantly older woman who dares to follow the dictates
of her heart, social norms about old age be damned. One can speculate
that, by imagining for the first time a life-affirming protagonist who
refuses to feel trapped by either her gender or her advanced age, Weldon
has given narrative form to some of her own hopes and wishes—even
her fairy-tale fantasies—on behalf of all women who dare to challenge
the conventional cultural scripts of aging. More broadly, her novel
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197
succeeds as an attempt to “alter or inflect our experience of aging and
advanced old age by changing our representations of it” (Woodward
193). Rhode Island Blues may be a fairy tale, but it is a satisfying one:
an exuberant and genially comic narrative of an older woman’s emotional, spiritual, and, yes, sexual liberation. What distinguishes this
particular retelling—complete with the rescue of the princess from her
prison and from the wicked witch by her prince, along with a happilyever-after ending—is the reader’s awareness that Weldon has taken the
classic tale into decidedly new territory: traditional fairy tales never
feature elder (much less octogenarian!) princesses. Fittingly, in a final
glance into the magic mirror, Felicity Moore understands what the
reflection has been trying to tell her. It offers not only guidance specific
to her stage of life but also the moral of Weldon’s tale: “Time’s short.
Don’t waste what’s left” (293).
Notes
1. Lest readers assume that the reference is to Henry James’s novel The
Golden Bowl, Weldon advises us through Sophia that the original source of the
retirement home’s name (though the connection is not mentioned in its brochure)
is Ecclesiastes:
Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth,
while the evil days come not,
nor the years draw nigh,
when thou shalt say,
I have no pleasure in them;
While the sun,
or the light,
or the moon,
or the stars,
be not darkened,
nor the clouds return after the rain:
. . . and desire shall fail:
because man goeth to his long home,
and the mourners go about the streets:
or ever the silver cord be loosed,
or the golden bowl be broken at the fountain,
. . . then shall the dust return to the earth as it was:
and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. (35; ellipses in original)
2.According to Jung, synchronicity is a “‘meaningful coincidence’ of outer
and inner events that are not themselves causally connected” (226).
3.According to Kathleen Woodward, a phantasm is a psychic representation that “speaks . . . mysteriously to our fears and desires” (176).
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4.Interestingly, in her observations about female aging published more
than half a century ago, Simone de Beauvoir wrote presciently about the discrepancy between mirror image and inner self: “When one feels oneself a conscious,
active, free being, the passive object on which the fatality [of aging or death] is
operating seems necessarily as if it were another. . . . This cannot be I, this old
woman reflected in the mirror! . . . The woman puts her trust in what is clear
to her inner eye rather than in that strange world where time flows backward,
where her double no longer resembles her, where the outcome has betrayed her”
(649). Similarly, but more recently, Woodward has noted, “The psyche longs for
youth, and the body is an insult and an impediment” (188).
5.In Jungian theory, the animus, “the male personification of the unconscious
in woman,” may appear in different forms, both positive and negative. “The positive side of the animus can personify an enterprising spirit, courage, truthfulness,
and in the highest form, spiritual profundity. Through him a woman can experience the underlying processes of her cultural and personal objective situation, and
can find her way to an intensified spiritual attitude to life” (198, 206–7).
6.As she has done elsewhere in her fiction, Weldon has drawn some details
for Rhode Island Blues from her own personal experience or family history. In
her autobiography, Auto da Fay, she reveals that her aunt Faith was seduced by
her aunt’s mother’s brother when she was seventeen. When the two were discovered together, the uncle was banished from the house, and “Faith was tipped
into what would now be called a violent psychotic episode, from which she never
recovered. She was locked away, for her own protection and that of others.” Her
mother “wiped her daughter from her memory: she went, as they would say now,
into denial. It was the shock waves from this tragedy which echoed through the
generations to disastrous affect [sic]. My mother lost her sister, ally and friend,
the cohesion of the family was gone: the centre could not hold. Free Love, the
creed by which the redheaded uncles also lived, is fine in principle but can be
tragic in its consequences” (106–7).
7.Nancy A. Walker observes that Weldon frequently uses fairy-tale motifs
in her novels—in most instances ironically, to critique the social attitudes that
shape and limit her characters’ lives. As she notes, “Weldon’s female characters
and narrators are obsessive storytellers, modern Mother Geese who spin tales
compounded of truth and lies, and then revise these stories in much the same
way as fairy tales have undergone revision over time. . . . There is a clear sense
that her characters are immersed in a sea of tales—fairy tales, old wives’ tales,
cultural mythologies, lies they tell themselves and others” (10).
8.In Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife,
Margaret Morganroth Gullette identifies the socially constructed “master narrative of aging” (66) as a pattern of thinking in Western culture that has become
so collectively embedded and individually internalized in our perceptions of age
and aging, particularly for women, that it is difficult to acknowledge or resist.
Though she focuses principally on the culturally reinforced “narrative of decline” that negatively colors “midlife,” her observations are valuable for considering the even more limiting scripts that shape expectations for the decades that
follow. As Gullette phrases it, “old age in general can be represented as lonely,
terrified, boring, sickly, and costly to society. But it is midlife aging that repels
women first. Fear of fifty intensifies fear of ninety” (94).
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199
Elsewhere, in “Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age,” I explore representations of two older women who find themselves drawn into romantic relationships or infatuations with younger men. However, both Doris Lessing’s
Sarah Durham of love, again (1996) and Marilyn French’s Hermione Beldame of
My Summer with George (1996) are two decades younger than Weldon’s Felicity.
Carolyn Heilbrun has suggested that there are virtually no imaginative scripts
for older women that offer “adventure” without “romance.” If there were, “we
in our late decades would be able to free ourselves from the compulsion always
to connect yearning and sex. If an ancient . . . woman finds herself longing for
something new, something as yet not found, must that something always be sex
or till-death-do-us-part romance? The reason for the predominance of sexual aspiration, I have decided, is that no other adventure has quite the symbolic force,
not to mention the force of the entire culture, behind it” (103).
9. See Weldon’s Down among the Women (1972), Female Friends (1974),
and Praxis (1978).
10. For a brief overview of novels mentioned in this essay and other novels by Weldon, see Rubenstein, “The Feminist Novel in the Wake of Virginia
Woolf,” 52–54, 61–62.
Works Cited
Barreca, Regina, ed. Fay Weldon’s Wicked Fictions. Hanover, NH: UP of New
England, 1994.
de Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. 1952. Reprint,
New York: Knopf, 1993.
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the
Politics of the Midlife. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997.
Heilbrun, Carolyn. The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty. New York: Dial
Press, 1997.
Jung, Carl G. et al. Man and His Symbols. New York: Dell, 1968.
Rubenstein, Roberta. “Feminism, Eros, and the Coming of Age.” Frontiers 22,
no. 2 (2001): 1–19.
———. “The Feminist Novel in the Wake of Virginia Woolf.” In A Companion
to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000, ed. Brian W. Shaffer, 45–64. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
Walker, Nancy A. “Witch Weldon: Fay Weldon’s Use of Fairy Tale Tradition.”
In Barreca, 9–20.
Weldon, Fay. Auto da Fay. New York: Grove Press, 2003.
———. “The Changing Face of Fiction.” In Barreca, 189–97.
———. Down Among the Women. 1972. Reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1973.
———. Female Friends. 1974. Reprint, Chicago: Academy, 1988.
———. Praxis. (1978). Reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990.
———. Rhode Island Blues. New York: Atlantic Monthly P, 2000.
Woodward, Kathleen. Aging and Its Discontents. Bloomington: Indiana UP,
1991.
C hapter 8
On the Road Again
Aritha Van Herk’s No Fixed Address
and Suzette Mayr’s The Widows
S ally C hivers
Anyone who lives in the city knows it can be a jungle out there some days.
But for the elderly or those with illnesses or disabilities, it can be a jungle
every day. Simple things such as taking a walk or going to the store can
be challenges because of difficulties presented by streets, sidewalks and
their surroundings.
—City of Vancouver Web Site
The above-cited passage justifies the city’s new “wellness walkways”
program—an initiative that incurs great expense to retrofit unnavigable parts of Vancouver for greater mobility. Even better, the words
attribute impaired mobility not to supposedly inadequate bodies but
to structural—quite literally constructed—constraints, precisely demonstrating how elderly frailty can be socially constructed. Of course,
bodies do change at all ages, but it is not so much changed bodies that
pose limits to mobility as it is social factors (concrete and discursive)
that impose them.
In The Rejected Body Susan Wendell explains how such social circumstances construct disability around different bodies: “Aspects of
social organization that take for granted the social expectations of performance and productivity, such as inadequate public transportation
(which I believe assumes that no one who is needed in the public world
needs public transportation) . . . create much disability” (40). Aging
citizens face rejection in part because of social standards of utility. Since
they may no longer be “productive” participants in the social structure,
their mobility is not a major issue. Also, the countless inappropriate
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but often automatic interpretations of decay and instability mapped
onto older bodies render them best kept out of the public eye, unless
as examples presented for momentary pathos. Pervasive social opinion
dictates that old people in particular should be static and contained.
A number of popular cultural depictions define old people by their
physical confinement. Dickens’s Miss Havisham (who is not actually old
by any contemporary definition, but who is very often read as elderly)
inhabits a home as haunted and mysterious as is her relationship to
time. HBO’s The Sopranos situates the deviously ambiguous Livia
Soprano in a nursing home from which she wreaks havoc, perhaps on
purpose, perhaps by accident. Such representations match circulating
conceptions of old age as a time of restricted space and mobility. What
is more, contemporary writers work within and against what Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar have described as a long literary tradition
of confining women spatially and, at most, depicting their escape,
psychic or physical, from that confinement along with whatever it
may symbolize (85). The combination of gender with age intensifies
perceptions of social restrictions (Susan Sontag famously articulates
the twofold disempowerment as “the double standard of ageing” in
her article of that name). The literary trope of stasis, reinforced by
age and gender, represents cultural attitudes toward “othered” bodies whose mobility would threaten general understandings of capacity
and utility. Recently, however, particularly in Canadian fiction and
contemporary popular film, a distinct trope of elderly women’s defiant
mobility, often exceeding escape, supersedes outmoded stasis. A large
number of works—such as Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel,
Hugh Garner’s A Trip for Mrs. Taylor, Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms, Suzette Mayr’s The Widows, Deepa Mehta’s Camilla, Bruce
Beresford’s Driving Miss Daisy, Cassie Mann’s The Trip to Bountiful,
Cynthia Scott’s The Company of Strangers, and David Lynch’s The
Straight Story—all depict elderly characters going back on the road,
desperately, exuberantly, and gracefully. Because the works expand the
narrative element of space more than that of time, these artists develop
portrayals that contradict the familiar stereotypes of elderly characters
as housebound and left to travel only in memories.
In the consumer-based, “health”-touting set of representations collected under the banner of “successful aging,” signs of age can be
hidden not by locking elderly people away but through a transformation of their physical form by means of both surgical and nonsurgical
interventions. Typical anti-aging skin cream advertisements compel us
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to invest in ideas of continued youth, and they never feature older faces
in their attempts to sell beauty. Rather, a dewy-complexioned young
face stares from the pages of a magazine showing readers what they
can never look like again, even if they believe in the pseudoscientific
descriptions of the product displayed. The pressure to hide aging intensifies as baby boomers begin to occupy the category of late life.
In this chapter I want to turn to literary constructions of old age
as a way to defy the youth-centric imperatives of “successful aging”
and to place older women boldly in sight. I have argued elsewhere that
contemporary Canadian fiction offers a productive site for rethinking
gerontological theories in order to produce a “constructive” approach
to old age that is neither relentlessly positive in glossing over the difficulties faced by many in late life nor overwhelmingly gloomy in positing all-encompassing physical decline.1 Two Canadian novels, Aritha
Van Herk’s No Fixed Address and Suzette Mayr’s The Widows, invest
in the possibilities and probabilities of fictional form to imagine a
world wherein older women show their wrinkles and embark on literal as well as symbolic journeys. The first depicts a Western Canadian
young picara crisscrossing prohibitive landscape opting ultimately to
drive off the map. The second offers a senescent road trip that counters
standard west-bound progress narratives, depicting instead an eastbound trio intent on taking Niagara Falls. Together, both revising a
centuries-old picaresque tradition of writing a rogue on the road, these
novels speak to a progressive mobility for women and to a world of
possibilities for old women.
“Get in the space ship Granny”: The Aging Picaro
Ursula Le Guin writes the essay “The Space Crone” from within her
experience of menopause. She addresses the hypothetical situation of
an alien culture, which she calls Altairean, coming to earth and asking
politely, “We have room for one passenger; will you spare us a single
human being, so that we may converse at leisure during the long trip
back to Altair and learn from an exemplary person the nature of the
race?” Le Guin proposes that instead of finding a brave young man
or even a confident young woman, earthlings should seek out “an old
woman, over sixty, from behind the costume jewelry counter or the
betel-nut booth” (251). She argues that such a woman “has a stock of
sense, wit, patience, and experiential shrewdness, which the Altaireans
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might, or might not, perceive as wisdom. . . . Since they are curious
and kindly, let’s give them the best we have to give” (251–52). Le Guin
exalts working-class, older women in a careful reconfiguration of cultural value. Whereas women, so frequently associated with the body,
are typically perceived to lose value as they change physically, Le Guin
assigns old women the highest value on the very basis of those changes
and experiences.
Le Guin also situates older women as travelers, contrasting the
more typical image of the male traveler on a quest for freedom and selfknowledge. By bringing the betel-nut booth worker out from behind
the counter, she raises questions about mobility—physical, social, and
cultural. While literal travel has conventionally been the privileged
domain of a wealthy elite, metaphorically, travel has connoted selfknowledge and even late life as an arduous yet rewarding process.
But as Lisa Chalykoff points out, postmodern advances in geographical thought clarify the importance of distinguishing between physical
space and mental space, especially in order to make room for the
consideration of social space. She explains: “Social spaces are those
we encounter most frequently in daily life. Even our knowledge of
that most personal of all spaces—our ‘material’ bodies—is mediated
to us through socially produced epistemes that imbue these intimate
spaces with a highly social character” (162). The two literary depictions of older characters traveling that I compare in this article—Aritha
Van Herk’s No Fixed Address and Suzette Mayr’s The Widows—both
imply a literal possibility and allow for a literal reading of old people
on the road. However, these two texts also push the limits of recognized textual and geographical narratives and forms, inviting readers
to imagine new spaces for old age. In doing so, they re-create a social
space of late life, through narrative experiments that bring together
typical social readings of older bodies with new interpretations of
senescent physical forms.
In “The Road Work of the New American Picaresque,” Rowland
A. Sherrill explains that new picaresque narratives “cannot presume
(or presume to represent) broadly homogeneous social scenes and hierarchically stratified social groupings and cannot either count on readers to recognize social ‘types’ codified by time and traditions” (5). He
points to a shift in depiction that allows a new freedom to move for
previously static characters. Though he does not mention them explicitly, his claims imply that elderly characters can break out of traditions
that held them firmly in place. Because of what Sherrill perceives as a
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new cultural fluidity, the picaresque genre moves beyond its tradition
of satire into new forms of cultural critique. As Sherrill puts it, “the
new picaresque forges its particular form of cultural response not in
satire but in exploration, discovery, and map-making in an America in
so many ways become terra incognita” (5).
Contemporary works that depict elderly characters on the road
again do not adhere faithfully to any one particular travel writing
form. However, almost all dip, at least momentarily, into the bag of
tricks provided to picaros, perhaps because the attendant humor makes
easier, however questionably, a depiction of an incongruous traveler on
the road. Elderly characters do conform to many requirements of picaros: by virtue of their age and contemporary attitudes toward aging,
they have been situated as socially marginal; because utility is reserved
for the young, elderly characters have the freedom from responsibility
required of picaros. As Sherrill describes it, “The picaro’s exile onto
the ambiguous and haphazard twistings of the road, into the life of
continuous mobility and encounter, results from his or her sense of
marginality, of being or being made ‘eccentric,’ however temporarily,
of being pushed to the peripheries and away from the center of American social ‘normalcy,’ however perceived” (“Picaresque Borrowed and
Blue” 44). By characterizing old age as a time of “exploration, discovery, and map-making” in literal and figurative senses, novels that feature older picaras revise cultural understanding in the way that Sherrill
claims the new American picaresque can. From a marginalized position, contemporary authors challenge the “normalcy” and normativity
that heroic novel conventions embrace and (try to) enforce. This essay
charts a progression from Van Herk’s younger picara, Arachne Manteia, whose encounters with a much older male lover help clarify her
position outside previously charted territories, to Mayr’s three older
picaras, Hannelore, Clotilde, and Frau Schnadelhuber, whose tumble
down Niagara Falls solidifies the rebellion needed to revise cultural
scripts that attempt to hold elderly characters firmly in place.
Out of Bounds: Mapping No Fixed Address
Published to great acclaim in 1986, Van Herk’s “amorous journey”
rewrites both masculinist travel narratives and masculinist prairie narratives. In an essay titled “Women Writers and the Prairie: Spies in an
Indifferent Landscape,” Van Herk demands, “Name the west’s fiction.
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Grove, Mitchell, Ross, Wiebe, Kroetsch. Laurence of course, not so
much an afterthought as an anomaly” (139). And she carves a place for
herself: “Man and his straight line—steel, yet—horizontal world cannot contain or even predicate the female curve of prairie, let alone enter
it” (142). Her picara, the traveling underwear saleswoman Arachne
Manteia, circles the prairies and explores their boundaries until the
offbeat protagonist drives north off the map into the territory of Van
Herk’s next book-length work, Places Far from Ellesmere.
As Dorothy Jones describes it, in Arachne, Van Herk creates “a
woman character who voluntarily chooses the role of social outcast,
eventually abandoning all idea of living in a house. She thus becomes
a measure of that society’s limitations, but also a symbol of the creative possibilities which might be released if those limitations are
transcended” (“Interview” 10). Arachne’s sexual exploits embody her
larger sense of exploration and the categories exploded by Van Herk
in this relentlessly feminist remapping of the Western Canadian literary landscape. Marlene Goldman explains the resulting positioning
of male characters in the novel: “Patterned on the character of the
traditional male rogue, Arachne is a sexually casual, itinerant trickster,
who, like the class of spiders she is named for, treats men like flies”
(27). But the first of many sexual adventures depicted in the novel,
one that recurs throughout the section set in Alberta, does not quite fit
into that pattern. Arachne initially encounters Josef, an “old buzzard”
with “rheumy eyes” (12), at Crowfoot’s grave. Immediately struck by
his hair, “a spun floss of white, thick and wild” (10), Arachne resents
Josef’s presence because he also spots a partially buried skull that
she wants to keep from prying eyes. She is disgusted by the “reed of
his voice” (12), but they first connect when they both reach to touch
the relic: “Together they kneel at the mound and touch the bone”
(16). Josef’s presence allows Arachne a sexual power that rewrites
the midlife crisis stereotype of men taking on younger trophy lovers
to shore up their masculinity in the face of its supposedly inevitable
fading. Their physical connection defies other characters’ assumptions
about the possibilities of sexual desire. Arachne does not take care of
Josef out of sympathy; in fact, she never adopts the role of caregiver.
Rather, her “body surges. She wants to wrap her arms around his
frame, touch his knobbed and flaccid skin again” (159). Especially
when outside the social constraints that bind her within city limits, she
reads Josef differently from how she does when he is surrounded by
social signs of his supposed inadequacy.
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Van Herk demonstrates how Josef’s context and companions define
his late life. Alone with Arachne, Josef “is strangely wild; he calls her
from her body despite the cane flung down in the stubble, his slack
skin. They are thieves locked in the same cell, a man with too little and
a woman with too much.” However, contained by the broader social
context, when he is under his daughter’s care at her home, his virility suffers. Within Arachne’s sight, with his disapproving daughter’s
reproach evident, “he shambles, bent and subdued under her iron
love” (152). To Arachne’s confidante, Thena, Josef is only an object
of disgust: “Just remember, old men are big babies. They whine, they
slobber, they’re incontinent. It’s a natural outcome of the way they live
their lives. Bastards” (160). Even Arachne often views Josef within the
framework set up by these other characters and circumstances: “There
is something so powdery in his stance, so shaky that she cannot believe
what they did in the field. He must have been powerful once; his frame
juts through age. Now he seems immensely old, laborious and balanced
attention evident in his shrunken buttocks, revealing lost strength and
muscle” (158). But the sexual desire Arachne has for Josef overpowers
this physical impression so that she feels compelled to try to free him
from that ultimate symbol of elderly fragility, the nursing home. His
escape, and her role in it, culminates in her escape from the landscape
she has previously traversed. Whether it is a literal escape, a death, or
a disappearance is never resolved, but the act of freeing Josef frees her
from her already rebellious social roles.
The unlikely, overwhelming sexual desire Arachne has for Josef
raises eyebrows both because female characters rarely achieve the position of subject (sexually or otherwise) but more frequently appear as
objects of physical desire and also because this unlikely sexual object,
a nonagenarian man whose daughter can no longer care for him, still
exudes sensual strength. Goldman, in a brief mention of this love affair,
reads it as beyond the confines of a realist plot: “No Fixed Address
refuses to reduce Arachne’s desire to travel to the confines of a realistic
plot: the spider-like Arachne is never caught in her own web. Instead,
she fearlessly crosses into unmapped territory. Moving beyond the
conventional roles of daughter, wife, and mother, she remains sexually
appetitive and adventurous—so much so, that she flaunts social convention that relegates the elderly to an asexual limbo, and has a passionate affair with Joseph [sic], a coppersmith who is almost ninety”
(29). I suggest that Van Herk writes the romance between Arachne and
Josef as though it is a realist refusal of social roles, and her revisionism
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relies upon this laughing at the usual expectations of a realist plot. As
Van Herk explains in an interview with Dorothy Jones, “I like turning
reality on its head to show women who are actually in control of their
lives and who are acting upon their fictional lives rather than being
acted upon themselves” (7). She writes the possibilities of an empowering May-December romance to make that possible. Briefly, Arachne
feels her youth and the possibility of her death through her encounter
with Josef, asking herself, “What makes her feel his surrogate, his
deputy? One genuflection over an unburied skull? One quick tumble
in a field? The dead are dead. Arachne is alive.” However, Van Herk
disallows that simple explanation of their connection by finishing the
passage with the words, “And, for that matter, so is he” (160). Readers
cannot simply read Josef as practically dead due to his age, the way his
daughter does. Arachne explores her emotional connection to lovers in
this particular sexual scene more than she does in later frequent occurrences, thinking, “She can lay herself in Thomas’ arms with complete
faith, while her sympathy for Josef is more like recognition, an indication of what she might become, a reminder of the ragged child that
Raki was” (160), but the overriding explanation remains a socially
improbable lust.
Throughout No Fixed Address, self-reflexive italicized sections,
each entitled “Notebook on a Missing Person,” toy with readers who
seek impossibly unmitigated realism, offering only a search for answers,
one that proves not to be the most effective entry into this innovative
narrative. Ian MacLaren explains: “Probably most readers want to
find out who the hell the italicized voice belongs to, not recognizing
it as the realistic reader’s—for once the displaced voice—which sits
outside the narrative; this voice tries to track down the picara who
ventures outside society, the home of realism.” Arachne Manteia is a
new figure on the narrative landscape, and readers searching to find a
reference point for her will leave the novel with many questions. Still,
Arachne’s quest depends upon this parallel search. As Van Herk tells
Karin Beeler, “what I wanted to do was put the follower of the picaro,
or picara in this case, into the text, so that the picaresque novel cannot exist without the one who searches or follows the journey as well,
whether that be a combination of reader/researcher” (88). The revision
of the picaro quest relies upon this layered structure. It does not matter whether someone like Arachne really could have a lover like Josef,
actually could live as a traveling underwear saleswoman who does not
wear underwear, or possibly could have sex without condoms and not
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risk disease. It does matter that a novel can and does imagine these
possibilities, and the reader of No Fixed Address has to follow Arachne
in these adventures and think about his/her own role in the textual
process of making this story possible.
Looking the Part: Experimenting with The Widows
In Suzette Mayr’s The Widows, the role of picara is shared by a group
of senescent women whose incongruous journey to achieve a heroic
quest audaciously shifts the margins. Like Van Herk’s labyrinthine
journey, the map made by Mayr’s forays into magic realism interrogates dominant representative strategies, troubles prevailing narrative
patterns, and proposes a key role for narrative experimentation in the
revision of age identity. This is not so simple as to claim that postmodernism questions dominant narratives, although that is part of the textual process at work in both of these novels. Rather, the ways in which
both Van Herk and Mayr manipulate the realist novel and experiment
with time and space make room for depicting parts of old age, other
than physical suffering, sage advice-giving, and grandmotherly doting,
which do not typically occupy central plots.
In The Widows Mayr openly and humorously challenges the expectations of aging and voyaging. In depicting three women aged seventyfive through eighty-five following the example of the sixty-three-year-old
woman who was the first person to take Niagara Falls and survive,
the novel conjoins various motivations elderly women may have for
embarking on a quest. Hannelore Schmitt’s inexplicable connection to
the water pouring down the rocks that she saw the first time she came
to Canada from Germany in 1971 represents a continued sense of hope
well into late life. Hannelore’s sister Clotilde’s habitual choice to follow
under protest exemplifies the at times forced interdependent communities that arise in the face of old age. However, the reasons why Frau
Schnadelhuber, Clotilde’s lover, embarks on the cross-Canada trek are
perhaps the most poignant and revealing. Her excitement at the potential of committing the “Crime of the Century,” and its significance for
her future, transcends her depression at two potent symbols of an old
age she cannot tolerate: having been both fired from her job and given
a Lifeline pendant by her daughter.
As in No Fixed Address, characters who seem unlikely to engage in
sexual plots appear decidedly sensual in The Widows. If one were to
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believe reviewer Mary Soderstrom, “There’s a lot of sex in The Widows by Suzette Mayr, a comic novel about three old women: straight
sex, lesbian sex, remembered sex, substitute sex—and symbolic sex in
the form of a head-long, tumultuous trip over Niagara Falls in an eggshaped vessel appropriately called the Niagara Ball” (25). It is interesting that reviews note this supposedly predominant sex since, though
elderly female characters do engage in most of the forms of sex listed,
Mayr’s first novel, Moon Honey, far exceeds The Widows in the number of sex scenes but invites no such mention in reviews. But because
in The Widows the characters depicted as sexual—old women—do
not match public perceptions of who is supposed to seek and revel in
pleasures of the flesh, and particularly transgressive pleasures, the sex
becomes the dominant metaphor through which the central characters’ far greater achievement, going over Niagara Falls in a barrel, is
read.
I suggest other metaphorical and experiential readings of the “headlong tumultuous trip over Niagara Falls” taken by Mayr’s motley
assemblage of old women. Mayr posits a late life rich with adventure
and community that transcends contemporary calls for “successful
aging” through physical modification and that does not trip up on
the materiality of the aging body. Mayr’s revolutionary road-trip narrative proposes a late-life quest into self-realization and engagement
with historical models that contributes to contemporary gerontological
calls for new models and theories of aging without denying the various
physical changes that often do accompany late life.
The Widows’ narrative structure presents readers with multiple
layers of access to the story of women embarking on an improbable
journey. For example, Mayr adds a layer to the representational framework that highlights the generic restrictions on female old age within
a literary context when she introduces readers to the Niagara quest
through the musical playing at the Royal Auditorium, Hannelore’s
place of employment. Her imagined Niagara! The Musical embodies
the revisionism expected of an ageist context, in that the staged version
revises heroine Annie Edson Taylor’s age downward by at least thirty
years. The young New York actress Sharon-Lee Silver, who plays Taylor, embodies a typical female sensuousness: “[She] knelt in simulated
Niagara river water, dry ice swirling around her, her lips red and luxurious, the curls of her blonde wig piled on her head like hairy whipped
cream” (69). Through Silver, Mayr sets up the story in a fairly typical
age-sanitized frame, where signs of aging are kept out of sight in order
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not to alarm an audience not quite ready to face the pervasive presence
of late life.
Still within the realist, if parodic, section of the novel, Mayr disrupts this version when Silver and her understudy are both unable to
perform. Mayr’s description of the audiences’ reaction to the sixtyyear-old wardrobe mistress, much closer to Taylor’s actual age, as
replacement mocks the unrealistic expectations that govern the contemporary entertainment industry. As though there has been a physical
disaster,
audiences run for the doors, past Hannelore who is working as an
usher: Patrons scampered up and down the aisles. Waved their arms
and clucked around the lobby in their expensive suits, their expensive
ticket stubs in their hands.
My wife and I paid to see Sharon-Lee Silver, said one in a grey
suit. He shook his stub in Hannelore’s face, almost jammed the stub
up Hannelore’s nose. I did not pay eighty dollars to see an understudy who doesn’t even look the part, he shouted. (123)
Mayr has subtly pointed out to readers that the wardrobe-mistressturned-actress in fact looks more the part of the “real life” Taylor than
does Sharon-Lee Silver. The irate audience member’s argument humorously reinforces the futility of arguing for a realist enjoyment of late
life. That is, he understands the revisionist version of the Niagara event
far better than he could ever understand the quest of the original Taylor. The failure of realism on stage foregrounds Mayr’s own detours in
magic realism that allow the quest for late-life notoriety to take shape.
Though reviewers would make much of it, the fact that Hannelore
takes advantage of her erstwhile lover, Hamish, in order to gain access
to the vehicle that will transport them down the waterfall has less to do
with her sexual fulfillment and more to do with her refusal to submit
to the gendered exigencies of her youth. Hamish is a necessary detour
for her, but she happily leaves him behind to embark on her quest with
her sister and her sister’s lover. The journey east along the TransCanada Highway stands in direct contrast to traditional progress stories
that always depict a journey west (“go west, young man”). Instead
of extending a frontier of exploitation (of land and peoples) through
youthful exuberance, these women retrace their steps in order to find
a point of reentry into narrative freedom.
The trip over the falls is an inspired encapsulation of aging jour-
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neys. The women choose an extremely difficult path and succeed by
teaming up, gleaning local resources, and hoping for the best. Their
collaborative efforts could serve as a model for creative efforts to
develop cooperative housing models that exceed the bounds of current
available nursing homes. As they tumble to the bottom, they experience physical indignity, an extremely angry ghost, and an unexpected
pause. While the aging process is not entirely physical, indignities of
the body do usually increase, as do thoughts of mortality that bring
up personal equivalents of ghosts in the form of thoughts about those
who have gone before. Pauses permeate late-life experience and likely
become more expected as time continues. As a final example of the
tumble as symbolic of any attempts to refuse typical attempts to hide
aging, the voyage is recklessly public and decidedly defiant.
The women break the local law by going over the falls and the
unwritten law by having 240-odd years of experience among them. In
order to convey the extreme rebellion and resistance that this tumble
encompasses, Mayr takes the extraordinary step of splitting the text
into parallel columns that signify simultaneity: the disruption to the
visual experience of novel reading, mimicking the shape of the falls,
is matched by the disruption to readerly complacency. Habitual leftto-right reading patterns cannot make sense of the page, and so the
reader has to choose an entry point and attempt to control the narrative strands, but on the first read, the reader has no reference point for
the significance of choosing one order over another.
The victorious journey earns the trio instant renown, though the
loss of their dental plates leaves them in a somewhat disadvantaged
position when speaking to reporters. Unlike Annie Taylor, who claimed
to be only forty-two, these women tell the truth about their age or
exaggerate it:
I am seventy-five years old, says Hannelore. My name is Mrs. Heinrich Schmitt, and I need to phone my son and daughter-in-law. Hannelore’s hair in straggles, her hands shaking, mouth bleeding.
I am eighty-five, says Clotilde. She pulls the blanket tightly
around her and her gums begin to mutter.
I will be one hundred and twenty-four next September, sings Frau
Schnadelhuber and she claps her hands in the air and begins to dance.
I smoke a pack a day and look at me! (241)
Mayr’s engagement with magic realism allows fantastical detours.
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Elderly characters are allowed adventures that most younger people
can only imagine, such as catapulting over waterfalls. The characterization of older tourists as daredevils speaks to a world of possibility
not so much for people as for fiction. It is unusual for anyone of any
age to attempt the falls. But it is typical for fiction to inject all number
of impossible possibilities into the human imagination. If Niagara!
The Musical can change Annie Edson Taylor’s age to twenty-nine, why
shouldn’t The Widows change it to ninety?
Conclusion
Current notions of “successful aging”—especially those encapsulated
in the anti-aging movement—can be damaging through their normative conception of success. Retirement magazines featuring energetic
silver-haired models on the tennis court hold out hope for readers that
the leisure that comes with retirement will be active and exciting, but
they do not offer much to those retired people who either cannot or do
not want to maintain the pace of working life. Further, the images are
based very much on a capitalist sense of individual achievement as key
to success. As Stephen Katz explains, “in equating the virtues of positive aging with successful aging, and anti-ageism with timeless antiaging, both professional and commercial fields share common ground
in their struggle to represent the new aging. At the same time, positive
agendas based on activity and mobility can downplay traditionally
crucial values such as wisdom and disengagement by translating the
latter into ‘problems’ of inactivity and dependency” (29). Social gerontologists have tapped into the potentially damaging messages of this
successful aging rhetoric, suggesting that the aging process itself should
be a model for a successful earlier life rather than the reverse and that
this can be achieved if collective action becomes a goal. Renowned
social gerontologist Thomas R. Cole, writing with David G. Stevenson,
explains the problems with the shallow rhetoric and thinking associated with the successful aging movement by linking those problems to
misunderstandings of the American Social Security process, saying that
“successful aging in this context means the combination of increased
freedom in retirement with undiminished physical and cognitive functioning. It should not be surprising that many of us fail to meet this
standard. Indeed, this myth of independence is perpetuated by the misguided belief that individuals should be able to fend for themselves, a
Chapter 8: On the Road Again
213
belief reinforced by the popular misconception that Social Security is a
contract in which the beneficiary and the contributor are perceived to
be one” (74). Understanding Social Security as a social (rather than a
user-pay) system could lead to a better understanding of the benefits of
including older people in the social imagination.
In her research based on interviews with long-living women, Carolyn M. Morell finds that the women “refuse to be the repository of
others’ fears and denials, or to see themselves through the ageist lens
that others do. Women may actively protest, like Helen, or disempower others’ perceptions through thinking practices. Carol told me
that ‘I don’t think about other people thinking about me ever. It’s my
thinking about other people that matters. What I think about others is
very crucial to my life, but what other people think about me doesn’t
bother me in the least.’ Helen also said at one point: ‘If you think I’m
old, that’s your problem!’” (74). This shift to an individual perspective
is not the individualistic “I’m not old but you might be” of dominant
“successful aging” discourses. Rather, it is a challenging perspective
on aging that comes from a transformative self-discovery dependent in
part on a phenomenological experience of late life.
No Fixed Address and The Widows defy normative space that
would confine older characters by depicting an openly vibrant alternative mobility, at times dependent, at times independent. They defy
cultural understandings of old age as a time of stasis and confinement.
Together these novels contribute to gerontology in developing new
ways of thinking about old age by manipulating the tricks and devices
of fiction. Each posits aging mobility as artistically exciting at the very
least, and as infinitely possible at the very most. The works co-opt the
troubling sense of exile in old age and turn it into an escape not from
old age but from countless unnecessarily debilitating constructions and
interpretations of old age. For example, the characters in The Widows
convey precisely the shift from self-consciousness to self-empowerment
that Morell’s interview subjects lay out.
The cultural depiction of elderly mobility participates in the same
process that results—or more often does not result—in concrete adaptations, such as curb cuts, that create the conditions of mobility or
immobility. Popular works that depict elderly characters as appropriately contained can negatively affect the social construction of aging.
Literature and film have interrelated but distinct roles to play in challenging the social construction of aging as static and decrepit. As Van
Herk tells Dorothy Jones, “Fiction ought to be suggestive. It ought to
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suggest to us alternatives” (“Interview” 13). Contemporary depictions
of elderly characters on the road again do more than expand literary
and film road genres; they reconfigure expectations of old age in a
way that stands to make elderly mobility important enough to matter
socially.
Note
1. See my From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and
Women’s Narratives for an elaboration of this point.
Works Cited
Beeler, Karen. “Shifting Form: An Interview with Aritha Van Herk.” Canadian
Literature 157 (1998): 80–96.
Chalykoff, Lisa. “Overcoming the Two Solitudes of Canadian Literary Regionalism.” Studies in Canadian Literature 23, no. 1 (1998): 160–77.
Chivers, Sally. From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and
Women’s Narratives. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2003.
City of Vancouver. “Episode 7: March 29, 2000: Taming the Concrete Jungle:
Vancouver’s Wellness Walkways Program.” www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/greater
dot/gv2000/episode7.htm.
Cole, Thomas R., and David G. Stevenson. “The Meaning of Aging and the Future of Social Security.” Generations 23, no. 4 (1999/2000): 72–76.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven,
CT: Yale UP, 1979.
Goldman, Marlene. “Earth-quaking the Kingdom of the Male Virgin: A Deleuzian Analysis of Aritha Van Herk’s No Fixed Address and Places Far from
Ellesmere.” Canadian Literature 137 (Summer 1993): 21–38.
Jones, Dorothy. “Interview with Aritha Van Herk.” SPAN: Journal of the South
Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies 25
(1987): 1–15.
———. “Living the Country: A Woman’s Reading.” Australian-Canadian Studies 10, no. 2 (1992): 87–98.
Katz, Stephen. “Growing Older Without Aging? Positive Aging, Anti-Ageism,
and Anti-aging.” Generations 25, no. 4 (2001/2002): 27–32.
Le Guin, Ursula. “The Space Crone.” In The Other Within Us: Feminist Explorations of Women and Aging, ed. Marilyn Pearsall, 250–53. Boulder, CO:
Westview P, 1997.
MacLaren, Ian. “A Charting of the Van Herk Papers.” 1987. University of Calgary Special Collections Web site. http://www.ucalgary.ca/library/SpecColl/
vanherkbioc.htm.
Mayr, Suzette. The Widows. Edmonton, AB: NeWest, 1998.
Chapter 8: On the Road Again
215
Morell, Carolyn M. “Empowerment and Long-living Women: Return to the Rejected Body.” Journal of Aging Studies 17, no. 1 (2003): 69–85.
Sherrill, Rowland A. “The Picaresque Borrowed and Blue: The Matter of
Change.” In Road-book America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque, 34–66. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000.
———. “The Road Work of the New American Picaresque.” In Road-book
America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque, 1–10. Urbana: U
of Illinois P, 2000.
Soderstrom, Mary. “Review of The Widows.” Quill & Quire 64, no. 4 (1998):
25.
Van Herk, Aritha. No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey. 1986. Calgary, AB:
Red Deer Press, 1998.
———. “Women Writers and the Prairie: Spies in an Indifferent Landscape.” In
A Frozen Tongue, 139–51. Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992.
Wendell, Susan. The Rejected Body. New York: Routledge, 1996.
C hapter 9
So Much Depends
Upon a Ya-Ya Scrapbook
Trauma, Figured and Reconfigured
S andra S inger
Angels of the Southern Crescent, fluff my pillows, please. Let moonlight
bathe me in my slumber. I’m a second-generation Ya-Ya on a long, long
trip.
—Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
Rebecca Wells’s novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (1996),
a sequel to Little Altars Everywhere (1992), generated tremendous
interest when it was first published, leading to a French translation,
Les divins secrets des petites Ya-Ya (1998); Ya-Yas in Bloom (2005);
and a film version. The Warner Brothers film Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002) came out with a star-studded cast, including Ellen Burstyn, Ashley Judd, Sandra Bullock, James Garner, and
Maggie Smith, lending cultural capital to the film production. The
name of one of the film’s production companies, All Girl Productions,
would imply that the film is intended for a particular audience. Angus
Macfadyen, playing the Irish fiancé role, confirmed the market niche
for the text—primarily women readers and viewers—and fulfilled his
description as a looker: “He’s Liam Neeson crossed with a young
Hank Fonda, who’s spent a few sessions on the couch” (Divine Secrets
169). However, well before the film Divine Secrets came out, the novel
and its predecessor had already spawned a social network: local meetings of older women (Ya-Yas) and younger ones (petite Ya-Yas), to
borrow the novel’s vernacular; a regular online column by the author;
and chat rooms and gatherings for fans. Online Ya-Ya chat rooms and
Q&A with the author echoed the novels’ and film’s focus on friendships among women that endure over fifty years.
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217
While the emphasis on women’s friendship in popular response is
consistent throughout the novels and the film, a shift in focus happened
between Divine Secrets as novel and film. The novel explores the experience of the early-middle-aged protagonist, actress and playwright
Siddalee Walker, as she reads the scrapbook kept for half a century
by the Ya-Ya Sisters (a group of four women, friends from childhood,
that includes Sidda’s mother). For Sidda, reading the scrapbook alone
in a remote cottage becomes the means whereby she learns to understand the correspondence between her mother’s joys and failures and
her own. Through Sidda’s experience, the novel, therefore, explores
the consequences for the petite Ya-Yas of having been raised under the
wing of the Sisterhood. In contrast, the film foregrounds and celebrates
the Ya-Yas themselves. Exclusive sisterhood among women, shaped by
Native American spirituality, southern Catholicism, and voodoo and
African American folk rituals, binds the Ya-Yas together in the film and
online (the principal Web site for online communication is http://www.
ya-ya.com/).
In their concentration on how the younger women were shaped by
their upbringing, the three English novels, Little Altars Everywhere,
Divine Secrets, and Ya-Yas in Bloom, actualize powerful social issues—
mother-daughter relationships, absent fathers, alcoholism, and child
abuse. In particular, the highly performative fiction, drawing especially
on dialogue, internal monologue, and dramatic scenes, highlights the
theme of trauma.1 Through her reading of the scrapbook, Sidda confronts again her painful abuse as a child that continues to traumatize
her adult life, preventing her marriage, and putting her theater career
on hold.2
The novel begins with Sidda’s unassimilated feelings about her
childhood abuse unexpectedly surfacing when Sidda inadvertently
blurts out to a New York Times interviewer that her mother strapped
her as a child, a confession that leads to a rift between Siddalee and
her mother, Vivi Abbott Walker. Searching for explanation, clarification, and the restoration of the relationship that her mother has broken
off, Sidda asks to read the Ya-Ya scrapbook, a collection of personal
memorabilia from her mother’s and her mother’s friends’ lives. As
Sidda works her way through the scrapbook, mostly in isolation in a
cabin on Lake Quinault in Washington State, the older women’s stories
are revealed to her. Understanding more fully the context in which she
was reared, Sidda is freed to investigate her own impasses and move
beyond them in her playwriting and marriage plans. Thus the theme
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of this volume (the spiritual adventures of midlife and older women) is
enacted here in an early-midlife woman spiraling back and advancing
on in her quest for self-understanding and spiritual insight.
This chapter will examine (1) the different ways in which Divine
Secrets portrays Sidda’s abusive childhood; (2) Sidda’s adult journey
back into childhood memories as a process of spiritual healing—the
acquisition of detachment from a past that tainted her sense of self
and the recovery of her own inner rhythms and meanings—in order to
recover independence understood as day-to-day, full functioning in the
world; (3) the process by which readers undergo their own spiritual
and therapeutic journeys while discussing the novels and the film in
Internet sources; (4) a spiritualized, cathartic return to origins in Little
Altars Everywhere; and (5) the reconciliation of Sidda and her mother,
and the hope this provides for the future.
Divine Secrets
The narrative of Divine Secrets works through flashbacks that are
triggered by Sidda’s encountering objects in the scrapbook such as
invitations, ticket stubs, a key, and photographs, items that draw out
memories from Sidda—often painful ones. For example, in the scrapbook, Sidda finds a handwritten thank-you note to Vivi from Willetta
Lloyd, the Walkers’ housemaid, dated December 1, 1957, “for the cashmere coat you done give me” (257). The note leads Sidda to speculate
about “this woman [Willetta] who had been a mother to her[, who] . . .
had given Sidda an acceptance and affection that were miraculous”
(258). Vivi had given the coat to Willetta in order to appease her own
guilt for running away to the Gulf Coast and leaving her children in the
African American woman’s hands without explanation. The memory
had previously occurred to Sidda as a nightmare recollection: “Once,
years ago, Sidda had dreamed of seeing her mother standing in a doorway. In the dream, when Vivi unbuttoned the coat, she had been naked
underneath, with gashes all over her body, as though she had fallen
on a bed of knives” (259). The “gashes all over her body” convey the
impact of Vivi’s destructive marriage, the tension eventually leading
to Vivi and her partner Shep sleeping in separate bedrooms. As she
begins to reexperience childhood emotions, Sidda slowly reassembles
and reconstitutes past memories, including dreams, which provide a
glimpse of what was previously only partially known to her, in this case
the extent of her mother’s anguish, pain, and depression.
Chapter 9: A Ya-Ya Scrapbook
219
The flashbacks bring attention to a special feature of Wells’s novel:
its disjointed time sequence. Sidda’s response while reading the scrapbook is typical of traumatic memory, which is unruly, jumping from
one time frame to another, reasserting the traumatic memory from the
past into the present. Trauma, according to Cathy Caruth, constitutes
“a break in the mind’s experience of time” (61). Elaborating on this
idea, Suzette Henke postulates that “traumatic memories constitute a
kind of prenarrative that does not progress or develop in time” (xvii).
Drawing on Caruth’s insights into the unruly and chaotic characteristic
style of trauma narratives, Henke emphasizes the manner in which this
writing gives words to what had before been only abstracted, privately
held impressions. According to Caruth, the traumatic event repeats
itself in the form of neurosis that is “not available to consciousness
until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (4). Using flashbacks triggered by clues
attached to the scrapbook, Wells’s fiction both fleshes out Sidda’s and
her mother’s history and suggests the workings of traumatic memories.3
Before the New York Times interview, Sidda had built up a secure life
in the North, developing marriage plans to Connor and making her
own life. However, following the interview, Sidda is caught in a nightmarish repetition of her mother’s behavior, incapable of acting other
than she imagined her mother did. Sidda identifies her individual possibilities so closely with her mother’s failure to achieve self-fulfillment
that, when the story of Vivi’s abusive child-rearing is published, Sidda
is transported psychologically and emotionally back to the impasses
of her childhood. Reenacting her mother’s loss of her lover Jack who
was killed in World War II, Sidda leaves Connor after imagining that
she will follow her mother’s example and fail as mother and spouse.
At the remote Washington cabin where she goes after leaving New
York, Sidda pores over the scrapbook, uncovering the past of both her
mother and her mother’s friends, a past that had been only vaguely
contemplated by their daughters in the context of their limited childhood understandings. In the course of her intensive study, a hard kernel of the past is turned up, one that Sidda cannot manage to process
on her own. Fortunately, the company of the Ya-Yas arrives (Necie,
Caro, and Teensy, but not Sidda’s mother, Vivi) after it becomes clear in
conversation with Caro, who is now old, suffering from emphysema,
and struggling to breathe, that Sidda was never given any explanation for her mother’s long disappearance after she beat Sidda severely.
This particular beating, the worst recorded in the fiction, operates as
a limit-event. Other stances of abuse approach or recede from this
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extreme instance. Sidda is severely traumatized when her mother lines
up and belts naked Sidda and her naked siblings (from the child’s eyes,
as punishment for wickedness) and then suddenly disappears with no
explanation. The child had conjectured—“She went away because of
me, didn’t she, Caro?” (173). In Laingian psychoanalytic terms, Sidda
bears the guilt for her mother’s furious disapproval.
Sidda is not able to come to terms with her past trauma and assimilate it in her present understanding of herself until she reads her past
differently in the scrapbook. In doing this she helps bridge what Cathy
Caruth, in her study of traumatic repetition, calls the chasm between
past trauma and future possibilities. Until Sidda can reconfigure her
mother’s beating her and then disappearing, she cannot but react to
memories that invade her present. The traumatic memory has not been
narrativized but instead is fixed in the past. In her introduction to Shattered Subjects, Suzette Henke speaks about the power of telling one’s
story to bring unintegrated traumatic memories into one’s consciousness where they can be dealt with. In Henke’s words, “Narrative recovery . . . pivots on a double entendre meant to evoke both the recovery
of past experience through narrative articulation and the psychological reintegration of a traumatically shattered subject” (xxii, emphasis
in original). Thus narrative has the power to free up the past—when
the individual is ready to receive it. In retelling her story, Sidda incorporates material from the past (found in the scrapbook), which as an
adult she now has the capacity to interpret, into a new sense of self.
Decoding the Ya-Ya scrapbook with support from Caro, Teensy, and
Necie represents the summation of Sidda’s training as a reader.
Spiritual Awakening
Importantly, many of the scrapbook’s contents are objects, which have
the effect of returning Sidda and the reader to a previous time. For
example, Sidda reexperiences childhood fear and her mother’s response
after she finds a key, which, as she explains to Connor, “used to hang
from a key chain that had a blue plastic elephant attached” (317).
Suddenly invaded by memories of the past, Sidda narrates a fantastic
elephant ride arranged for her by her mother after the real ride on the
mall tarmac had closed. Vivi began with a prayer:
“Siddalee,” Mama said, “close your eyes, just for a minute.” Then,
Chapter 9: A Ya-Ya Scrapbook
221
in her most magical high-priestess-European-queen-gypsy-fortuneteller voice, Mama began to speak.
“Lawanda [the elephant], oh Magnificent One, spirit Siddalee
and Vivi Walker away from this hot blacktop parking lot! Return us
to the untamed green jungle from whence we came!
“Are you ready?” Mama asked. “Are you willing?”
“Yes, Mama! I’m ready. I’m willing!”
“Then open your eyes! Open your eyes and witness Vivi and
Sidda of the High and Mighty Tribe of Ya-Yas as they commence
their great escape on the back of Royal Lawanda![”] (325)
On the way home after the elephant ride with her mother, Sidda found
that “the world outside our car seemed charged with mystery, all new
and unknown” (326). Within “the generosity of Connor’s listening”
(317), Sidda has contemplated the key and the magic moment it conjured up and found her way to accept the wisdom that her mother had
proffered in that moment: “It’s life, Sidda. You just climb on the beast
and ride” (326, emphasis in original). Thus Sidda is able to begin the
process of reclaiming her past and endowing it with her own meanings.
Though it had been possible while she lived up north for Sidda to
write beyond the limits of her family’s traumatic life experience, living
a new role proves much more difficult after the Times interview rekindles the emotions and experiences of the past. Even to consider change
requires Sidda’s disengagement from the childhood web of intense feelings and thoughts such as those instigated by finding the key. While the
process centers on Sidda’s reading the scrapbook alone in the cottage,
by itself the scrapbook is not enough. Human mediation is also needed,
and, at a crucial point, the Ya-Yas (not including Sidda’s mother, yet)
recognize the need to intervene personally. They arrive at the cottage as
witnesses to the scene of a long-ago crime. While the scrapbook opens
up the past, the lifetime friends flesh out that past for Sidda.4 Vivi
perceives the necessary healing for which Sidda yearns and accepts her
own temporary ostracism from the group and, in the process, begins
to come to terms with her failings as a mother and her struggles within
her marriage as she waits to be reinstalled within the circle of the tribal
Ya-Ya elders. Vivi responds to Sidda’s need for access to her mother’s
past by sending the scrapbook. As Vivi explains to Teensy: “I have sent
my oldest daughter—The Grand Inquisitor—Our ‘Divine Secrets of the
Ya-Ya Sisterhood.’ But there is so much I didn’t give her, cannot give
her. Cannot give myself” (248). Allowing the Ya-Ya Sisters to act as a
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conduit, Vivi acquiesces to their wish to explain Vivi’s disappearance
to her daughter.
The most crucial contribution of the elders (minus Vivi) centers on
the time after the children had been so severely beaten: Vivi Walker
“checked into a psychiatric clinic for three months. No one ever knew,
except us,” Caro informs Sidda. Caro continues by expressing her
regret that social convention prevented the Ya-Ya Sisters from explaining Vivi’s disappearance to her traumatized children: “What I regret
the most is that none of us ever talked with you, Sidda—or Little Shep,
Lulu, or Baylor. We hid behind some archaic belief that you do not
interfere with another person’s children” (305). Unlike her interaction
with the scrapbook and her mother, Sidda can question her mother’s
friends about her mother’s mental breakdown, and they clarify her
interpretation in an ongoing dialogue that uses the scrapbook as facilitator. Specifically about Sidda’s mother’s disappearance, Caro states:
“Here’s what I want you to know: not one bit of this is your fault.
Something just cracked in Vivi” (305, emphasis in original).
This is only one example of how the power of social norms prevents the Ya-Yas from interfering with the children and trivializes or
distorts the symbolic content of life histories. Thus Divine Secrets
investigates numerous youthful misadventures, sometimes leading to
trouble, undertaken by the Ya-Yas that at the beginning of the narrative
remain unanalyzed within Sidda’s unconscious. The novel’s structure
mimics Sidda’s consciousness, being nudged along by the scrapbook,
which brings to mind unconscious experience. The story is fragmentary, revealed through bits and pieces of information given in different
time frames and in different narrative forms. For example, we have the
time frame of the narrative’s present in 1993 as Sidda thinks over an
embarrassing incident in the past in which the Ya-Ya Sisters were put
in jail for the night on account of bathing in the town’s water supply.
Her recollection, given in the third person, draws on scrapbook entries
of two newspaper clippings from 1942. These are followed by an
omniscient account of the jail incident: “The night of August 3, 1942,
not five hours after Jack Whitman announced he was joining the Army
Air Corps, an embarrassed policeman locked Vivi Abbott and the YaYas into a cell in the Thornton jail” (149). These omniscient narrative
interludes, drawn from different time periods, provide material to the
reader that is not immediately available to Sidda, thereby inviting the
reader to construct the symbolic meaning of events and Sidda’s experience of them. Thus Vivi’s past suffering, including physical entrapment
Chapter 9: A Ya-Ya Scrapbook
223
in jail, enters the current story through Sidda’s and the readers’ construction and interpretation of the stories of the Ya-Yas’ past.
Only thus through omniscient interludes and reconstruction do
we gradually uncover the part that the Ya-Yas have played and continue to play in Sidda’s life. Each of the Ya-Ya Sisters has a distinct role
in their grouping, as may be seen when, in 1993, “they took the same
positions they had been taking in Teensy’s convertibles since 1941:
Teensy behind the wheel; Vivi, shotgun; Necie just behind the driver;
and Caro in the backseat behind Vivi” (12). Further, Necie toasts their
combined “sense of history” together, which Caro sees revealed in
“Ya-Ya-rabilia.” It is Caro who insists that Vivi make the scrapbook
available to her daughter, who has asked to see it: “‘Life is short,
Pal,’ Caro said. ‘Send the scrapbook.’” The Ya-Yas clink their glasses
in agreement when they have convinced Vivi to send the scrapbook:
“Each of them in turn met each others’ eyes. . . . This is a cardinal YaYa rule: you must meet each person’s eyes while clinking glasses in a
toast” (16, emphasis in original). An important aspect beyond having
known each other in depth over a long time is this trust and acceptance
of one another. Caro, for example, “didn’t” at the time and subsequently “won’t” judge Vivi for her parenting failures (305). However,
Teensy does step in to clarify for Sidda her mother’s disappearance
when Sidda was a child, though with Vivi’s blessing: “Okay, it’s in your
[Teensy’s] hands. Do whatever you think is right,” Vivi tells her (256).
Thus the Ya-Yas’ decision to send Sidda the scrapbook is done with
Vivi’s consent, as is their subsequent visit to Sidda without Vivi.
Within Divine Secrets we go back to the earliest days of the Ya-Ya
Sisters when they originally give themselves the name “the Louisiana
Ya-Yas.” Folk rituals drawn on (not from) Native American initiation
ceremonies from popular culture characterize the initiation ceremony
when the pubescent Ya-Yas form themselves into a group and begin to
constitute the ritual practices of the Ya-Ya Sisters. The chapter subsection “The Secret History of the Louisiana Ya-Yas” even gives the teenaged girls names that suggest Native American culture: Vivi is Queen
Dancing Creek; Caro is Duchess Soaring Hawk; Necie is Countess
Singing Cloud; and Teensy is Princess Naked-as-a-Jaybird (70–72).
The self-named group is tribal in construction. Although married eventually, the women are not only tied emotionally to their husbands or
to images of respectability. Their allegiance is also to one another. In
contrast, it is powerful husbands and social norms—especially those
implied by marriage and then motherhood—that destroy Genevieve,
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Jack’s mother, after her son is killed in war and that torment Vivi. Genevieve, the mother of Teensy and Jack, wildly spirited, her language
spiced with Cajun French, is mismatched to her very rich, conservative
husband, who is president of Garnet Savings and Loan. When Jack is
killed, Genevieve, a demonstratively loving mother, unable to accept
the fact of her son’s death, is heartbroken by the loss and does not
recover psychologically. She cannot forgive her husband’s desire that
Jack should join the war effort, reading her husband’s attitude as male
pride that put their son at risk.
If their sisterhood is portrayed as their strongest support, Catholicism is portrayed as a spiritual dead end, that is, a form of social
constraint associated with patriarchal norms. It enters the fiction principally through Mary Katherine Bowman Abbott, who is called Buggy
by her grandchildren. Buggy Abbott, as she is referred to throughout the novels, is Vivi’s pious, sexually repressed, jealous, vindictive
mother. Part of the psychic turmoil for Sidda in the fiction stems from
the ominous insight that she cannot be free from this guilt-ridden past
(reminiscent of the biblical reenactment of original sin). When Vivi in
desperation confesses to a priest of her desire to injure her children and
leave her spouse and family, the priest, while absolving her sin, sends
her home where she proceeds to beat her four children. The Church
conspires with societal values to hold women like Vivi and Genevieve
in unhappy situations. Moreover, the partners in Vivi and Genevieve’s
marriages represent patriarchal values—mirrored in the gospel and
power structures of the Catholic Church—that these wives are incapable of challenging effectively.
Nonetheless, the secular Catholicism that the Ya-Yas represent is a
lively challenge to Buggy Abbott’s guilt-encompassing religious practice
that acts like a stranglehold, preventing her daughter Vivi from finding joy with Jack. In the antebellum South of the Ya-Yas’ generation,
marriage constituted women’s only social or employment option; within
that sphere, Vivi could make a self-fulfilling or self-limiting match,
but the social expectation was marriage. The story may falter over this
issue for some readers who are not comfortable with Vivi’s dependence
on Jack for satisfaction. However, the second generation of women,
the petite Ya-Yas, has a new source of satisfaction and comfort. It is
not a male lover but the mother-daughter bond that is the source for
Sidda’s playwriting. As she says in the New York Times interview that
precipitates the impasse between herself and her mother, her difficult
childhood is to be embraced (not rejected). After the Times interview
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225
is released, Sidda asks Vivi on the telephone if she “read the part where
I credited you for my creativity? Where I said, ‘My creativity comes in
a direct flow from my mother, like the Tabasco she used to spice up our
baby bottles’” (2, emphasis in original). The plot is centered precisely
on this reconfiguring of the past by Sidda within the context of her current struggle over the fulfillment of work and marriage plans. Working
out psychopathology interactively in the family is an important development of R. D. Laing’s psychoanalytic theory: through the family’s
admission of a cross-generational destructive pattern, as signaled by
Vivi sending her daughter the scrapbook, Sidda can potentially work
through it. Reenacting the pattern of familial behavior as configured in
her own troubled engagement, Sidda learns to revalue and appreciate
her spiritual journey as a thread connecting female generations.
Vivi’s positive influence on Sidda the playwright and her other
children is apparent in the dramatic flair they exhibit. The four Abbott
Walker children are raised in theatrically charged spaces. They are
aware of their own capacity to create, even from a young age. “This
is more fun than I thought it would be!” says young Shep, Sidda’s
brother, when he has prompted his grandmother’s craziness by throwing dolls into the kitchen wastebasket (Little Altars 119). Buggy contends that her dog sees the dolls as her puppies. In the subsequent
chapter Sidda creates havoc at a pious friend’s house by taking an extra
slice of bread that is not accounted for. She reflects on the disorder her
sly act has achieved: “I’m so thrilled with what I’ve put into motion
that I can hardly sit still. I don’t know how I can ever confess this! It
feels great, like something I was born to do” (135). This performative
characteristic the children inherit from their mother. Recognizing her
inescapable participation as a child in roles that were predetermined
by her parents and her role as firstborn helps Sidda determine what is
valuable to take from her past.5
Sidda’s healing is a process of coming to terms with her past. Here
life is explored as a spiritual journey—through the generations—in all
its intensity, pain, and sudden illumination. With a greater understanding of her family story, and in particular family trauma, Sidda is better
able to discover new strengths and move forward with her life.
The Importance of Chat Rooms
The Ya-Ya movement outside the novel can be viewed as performing
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a bonding function for women readers that is similar to the necessary
reconnections that are formed in the course of the novels between
mother and daughter, Ya-Ya and petite Ya-Ya. Wells’s novels show
this primary relationship between women as necessary for sustaining
health and mental well-being. Through the documentation of their
shared history and their discussion of it, the female figures in the
novel as a group act out their past, bringing it into the present. Chat
room and online readers discuss and unravel the significance of the
scrapbook disclosures even as Sidda and the Ya-Ya Sisters perform this
function in the novel. Importantly, for readers of Wells’s fiction, making sense of the scrapbook is itself a shared experience.
The Ya-Ya chat rooms allow for letter-writing intimacy among
readers as they share interpretations of the novel. What further intimacy occurs in this Internet setting? Online visitors compose identities that can be compared to those of “the Louisiana Ya-Yas.” The
element of fantasy experienced by the Ya-Ya chat room visitors is
explored in Mark Poster’s book What’s the Matter with the Internet?
In particular, he elaborates on the aspect of “simultaneity,” which
“completely erases spatial factors and implodes time. The vectors of
space and time are drastically reconfigured in the new technologies.
They allow and even promote . . . forms of eroticism that threaten to
destroy basic social institutions” (26). Furthermore, the fantasy of
the Ya-Ya or petite Ya-Ya chat is not carried forward from Internet
dialogue in predictable ways. This interaction is unlike the film and
novel plot of Divine Secrets, which is resolved by the eventual face-toface meeting between Vivi and Sidda (who has been informed about
events in her childhood through the scrapbook) and by visits to the
cabin by the Ya-Yas and Connor. But the virtual interaction has its
own kind of power. In her “Welcome” comments, Wells recognizes
the specificity of the online Ya-Ya groups. She addresses “one of the
dedications of Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood: ‘To the Ya-Ya
Sisterhood in all its incarnations.’ One of those incarnations is a CyberSisterhood . . . , and I feel blessed to have been called into such community” (“Ya-Ya Notes”). Potentially, “meeting” new people on the Web
(and, in some cases, at Ya-Ya gatherings) also facilitates the process
of narrative recovery of past experience and its reintegration by the
individual, but in an imaginary environment without risk, in a manner
similar to viewing the Divine Secrets film or reading Wells’s books.
Poster seeks to “specify the parameters of these ‘virtual’ configurations” (18) that include chat rooms, or Q&A with the author. These
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227
seem to share with popular culture, which includes Wells’s best-selling
fiction, what John Fiske calls an emphasis on “process” rather than on
“products”: “Popular culture . . . is better recognized by what it does
than by what it is” (323, emphasis in original). Wells explains, in her
“Valentine’s Day, 2003” column addressed “Dear Sisters-in-Heart,”
the way in which her fiction has come to life in Ya-Ya meetings initiated through chat rooms: “As I write to you this month, I’m filled with
excitement at all the Ya-Ya gatherings I read about on the porch! Oh,
how I love the idea of all of you getting together. Meeting one another,
sharing secrets, finding soul sisters, laughing, getting rowdy, getting
quiet, quaffing, dining, howling, dancing, boogeying, chanting, being
your luminous selves.” Through the Internet the process of interpreting women’s lives that is initiated within Little Altars Everywhere and
Divine Secrets continues by making use of stories from the chat room
visitors’ lives.
In addition to the interactive Web site, part of the structuring of
community for readers not from Louisiana or nearby is the audiotape
of Divine Secrets and Little Altars Everywhere, read by Rebecca Wells.
Additionally, she provides an epigraph to Little Altars Everywhere
from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal: “Everything in life that we really
accept undergoes a change. So suffering must become love. That is
the mystery.” Wells articulates in her “Note to the Reader” what this
quotation means in terms of her sense of the relationship between
reader and writer through text. Fleshing out words, she describes “the
mystery” whereby “suffering [may] . . . become love.” In her words,
“Hidden blessings inside suffering. This is ultimately what Little Altars
Everywhere is about. . . . Breaks create openings that were not there
before, and in that space grow the seeds for new creation. So that at the
dark center of suffering that suffuses Little Altars Everywhere lies both
the luminance of blessing, as well as the seeds for my second book,
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (Little Altars xviii).
Beginnings: Little Altars Everywhere
Divine Secrets is more celebrated than Little Altars Everywhere. But
the success of Divine Secrets and the intensity of Sidda’s struggle with
her mother in that book led readers such as myself to search out the
previous novel, which is more clearly focused on the characters’ suffering. Divided into sections that represent particular figures in the story,
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there is significant accounting for Vivi’s partner, Shep, and her children
other than Sidda, figures who appear with little introduction in the
subsequent Divine Secrets. Little Altars Everywhere describes the cycle
of child abuse across generations between 1961 and 1991 from various subjective viewpoints. The perspectives of Vivi’s partner, Shep, and
Sidda’s three siblings, present in Little Altars Everywhere, are absent
from Divine Secrets, which focuses on Sidda, while the film focuses
on the Ya-Yas. Without Little Altars Everywhere, one could imagine
that Wells neglected to develop the other characters—Big Shep, Baylor,
Lulu, Little Shep, Willetta, and her spouse, Chaney; however, it is fair
to say that she had elsewhere already considered their positions in the
story and the defining aspects of their past.
Sustained verbal, physical, and sexual abuse is revealed from various points of view in Little Altars Everywhere. Details of the children’s
sexual trauma will be considered later; first, it is important to recognize the pathological nature of the abuse that is confirmed by Chaney
and Willetta and the Abbott Walker children. Vivi refers obliquely to
her madness in Divine Secrets only as “when I dropped my basket”
(255). Two Canadian collections of writing by women titled Dropped
Threads, collected by Carol Shields and her coauthors, use the metaphor of dropping to highlight restrictive information that young
women are told, what is concealed from them, and what women must
discover. In order to achieve full function in society, Sidda has to learn
similarly what occurred when her mother “dropped [her] . . . basket,”
or went mad. In her letter to Necie dated July 23, 1963, Vivi admits: “I
cannot talk about what happened. My life was a basket and I dropped
it” (Divine Secrets 297). The recovery of “dropped” items is essential
to Sidda’s comprehension of her relationship with her abusive mother
and to her picking up and continuing her own inner growth.
Incidents such as Vivi’s disappearance are only partially understood
by Sidda as a young girl. Clarification seems to have been deliberately
withheld from her. Sidda’s frustrated child’s viewpoint is shown, for
example, in the chapter titled “Wilderness Training: Siddalee, 1963,”
from Little Altars Everywhere, when Sidda’s girlhood voice introduces the Ya-Yas to the reader and concludes with the following comment about her being puzzled: “Also, the Ya-Yas were briefly arrested
for something they did [bathing in the town water supply] when they
were in high school, but Mama won’t tell me what it was because she
says I’m too young to comprehend” (Little Altars 5). Sidda needs to
follow her urges and hunches to satisfaction if she is to develop beyond
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229
a child’s perspective or to discover through the “Breaks” in the text
what Wells identifies as “the seeds for new creation.” For example,
Sidda’s childhood observation that Aunt Jezie, her mother’s sister, and
Charlene Parks, Sidda’s dance teacher, are unusually direct and open
with each other (30–31) develops more fully when she later finds them
in a lesbian embrace in bed (39). This follow-up on an early observation is a model that Sidda will need to use as an adult if she wants to
uncover the deferred meanings that seem to have been purposely concealed in her family.
Social and familial stability seems to require that psychological
or intellectual matters are not examined in Sidda’s family. Her father,
though absent much of the time drinking at the duck hunting camp,
represents the basic values that underpin the property-type relations
of white landowners. At the base of the family is “Daddy,” who, if he
“drives up [into the summer camp at Spring Creek where the Ya-Yas
vacation together with their children] in his pickup, you know he’d
yell at us, white women dancing like that,” released to the music of
Little Richard (Little Altars xxiv–xxv). Functioning in this family as
patriarchal authority, Shep Walker censors the spirited pleasure of the
women and limits the capacity of Sidda and her siblings, survivors of
child abuse, to question his authority effectively.
Each child in the family has a characteristic mode of response to the
“devil dance” between Shep and Vivi (Divine Secrets 167). Schizoid
attitudes and behavior are evident in all the children. Sidda notes: “I
don’t cry because I can’t breathe. Lulu starts eating her hair, like she
does whenever she gets upset. Little Shep and Baylor are mute, and
Baylor is shaking” (Little Altars 146).
Little Altars Everywhere identifies Sidda’s bias toward language as
a means to escape repressed emotions and develop understanding and
psychological well-being. When she runs away from her maddened
mother, Sidda finds refuge in a perilous hideaway in the cupboard
of a visiting library service van parked, and subsequently locked, in
the sweltering Louisiana heat. “That bookmobile is hot as hell, it’s a
475-degree gas oven” (96). Her occupation of the cramped, suffocating quarters represents her current and future existence as a “worddweller.” I borrow this notion from J. J. Steinfeld’s short story “Would
You Hide Me?” In the Steinfeld fiction, a fifty-four-year-old comparative literature professor describes her existence: “I . . . have spent a
lifetime dwelling in words” (15). Sidda’s unusual vocabulary for a
small child and developed language skills were noted by her mother
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(Little Altars 81, 85): “The nuns tested the fifth graders and said Sidda
has the reading skills of a high-school junior. Well, I could’ve told them
that. The child used the word ‘impeccable’ before she even started first
grade” (81).
Sidda’s language skill is apparent when she borrows the word
“impeccable,” which in her mother’s vocabulary signifies purity. Sidda
will learn to use this word (along with other family experiences) for
her own purposes. However, Sidda cannot remain in the book van of
words while she waits for her mother to rescue her. Eventually, she will
turn inherited words into what her mother sees as hurtful performative
theater and living.
At first Sidda’s performances are purely for herself as she attempts
to find solace in art. Preparing the piano piece she would perform,
called “The Elf and the Fairy,” is “the calmest part of my day. . . . I take
my quiet wherever I can find it” (Little Altars 141). From her recital
piece Sidda garners an image of fairies as “midget guardian angels with
a good sense of humor” (142). She invents a similar self-image for
herself: when she puts on her hand-me-down loafers, she is “a cheerleader who writes poetry” (147). Sidda escapes from the madness in
her family, a version of what Vivi endured living with Buggy Abbott,
“to a place in another state that doesn’t have all the hot white light of
Louisiana. There are waterfalls there and the air is so sweet and easy
to breathe” (142). This imaginary environment contrasts with her
constricted breathing when Sidda finds herself, along with her siblings,
embroiled in their parents’ heated arguments. For example, one fight
rests on the power of naming; Shep has called his spouse a drunk and
“just his saying that word ‘drunk’ changes everything, even changes
the air in the room” (146). Instead of this kind of chaos, Sidda creates order through piano playing and school routines. Repeating the
notes in her recital piece, she “feels like I can climb up inside them and
live there. Piano practice is the best way I know to feel organized”
(143). Similarly, she comments: “I can never fall asleep until everything
is organized [for school] and ready to go at the foot of my bed” (145).
Sidda needs to be resolute in her planning, as her family’s instability is
a constant source of upset that in fact serves to derail her well-prepared
recital piece. Sidda performs the piano recital in a schizoid manner:
“somebody else’s hands—wild, shaking, and ignorant—take over. . . .
I am confused, because part of me can actually hear myself playing the
music impeccably” (151, emphasis added).
Prior to the recital upset, Sidda had appreciated the self-control
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231
demonstrated by Sister Philomena, her piano teacher. Her mother,
however, has always been ambivalent about the education her children
receive at Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial school, largely
on account of the nuns being critical of her child-rearing and her marriage outside of the faith to affluent Shep, a Baptist. Yet, when conflict
at home disrupts her performance in the recital, Sidda also sees the
refuge in school and piano routines as illusory. Control, represented by
clean, orderly, quiet Sister Philomena, is rejected. Thinking about Sister
Philomena, Sidda concludes: “You don’t even know who I am” (153,
emphasis in original).
Will Sidda find her home in words? She has been remarkably adept
at using words from a young age. Both her parents note her vocabulary
and insight that are unusual for a child. It is probably not coincidental
that Sidda and the comparative literature professor in J. J. Steinfeld’s
short story both pursue an interest in drama. Siddalee becomes a playwright. The specialization of the narrator in “Would You Hide Me?”
is Samuel Beckett. She comments: “I bet Beckett would have loved the
texture of my [life] story . . . Yearning, longing” (9, emphasis and ellipsis in original). Sidda bunkering down in a cupboard within the town
bookmobile (during the scorching Louisiana summer) has chosen a
location in which she feels safe. Issues of safety also occupy Steinfeld’s
narrator, who is described as a “word-dweller” in relationship to
her father, who was once hiding under Nazi occupation, a “forestdweller” (15). The recurring question “Would you hide me?” speaks
to the daughter’s security in words and her Jewish father’s unease now
in a nursing home, and previously among non-Jews. Sidda at home
among books recalls a line from her demonstrative, vocal mother: “I
should have been a writer myself” (Little Altars 80). However, while
Vivi might have found release from her mother, Buggy Abbott, through
creative imagination, she didn’t. Her behavior is symptomatic, and
instead of creating new output, she and Shep Walker read Reader’s
Digest condensed books.
In response to the familial “devil dance,” Sidda’s sister Lulu resorts
to thievery in order to appease her “dry heart” (174). She has learned
“to reach out and take what I want for my own self” (155). She equates
stealing with her mother’s manipulation of social norms to meet her
own needs (157). The “Queen of Gimmee” (177, emphasis in original)
has trained the “Princess of Gimmee” (155). Lulu has been caught in
the act of stealing a hat for her father, whom she wants to protect from
the sun that exhausts him while burning up his energy in the cotton
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fields. What is interesting is the emotional chasm within, from which
Lulu’s need for compassion and understanding emerges. Maxine and
Verna, who catch her stealing from the Cowboy Store of Thornton
where they work, listen to her and hear her fictional story about her
being an orphan cared for by her brother. Lulu cannot explain the tears
that erupt: “I don’t know where they come from, like they’ve been
there on the edge waiting for a long time” (174). Lulu fantasizes about
leaving her family and embracing the two women as guardians.
Little Shep’s derision toward his mother is explained in the chapter
titled “Snuggling: Little Shep, 1990.” The chapter is written from the
viewpoint of Little Shep, who is now married to Kane and has two
children. The memories of sexual abuse by his mother haunt Little
Shep’s adult life. Little Altars Everywhere elaborates most graphically on the sexual play between the mother and her children (“kissing me and her hand would start wandering” [232]; “rub[bing] her
hand across one of my nipples” [236]; “I know those breasts and I
hate them” [235]). As a child, he read his mother surreptitiously and
called her (silently) an “old witch” (122, emphasis in original). Now,
as an adult, Little Shep says, “Mama acted like it was all normal,
you know, like it was her right. I’m not sure what all she did with
Sidda and the others—I just know what she did with me. They moved
Baylor out of my room when I was in third grade. They added onto
the house so we could each have our own private cell. No wonder she
wanted to have us all in separate rooms. That way there wouldn’t be
but one at a time to witness what she was up to” (230). Further, Little
Shep describes his childhood psychosomatic deafness, whereby he had
lost 83 percent of his hearing in his left ear, as symptomatic of abuse:
“I made the hearing go out of that ear because it’s the one that faced
the wall when I tried to sleep. I got tired of hearing all the shit you had
to listen to in that house. If Sidda convinced Mama she was already
sleeping or if the bitch hadn’t gotten enough, the old lady would come
into my room. And then it would start up.” In consequence, as an
adult, Little Shep never lets his children sleep with Kane and him, and
he has “been careful from the beginning to watch how I hug them, kiss
them, touch them.” Furthermore, he needs to be drawn into the family
by his wife and encouraged to bathe Kurt or Dorey, his own children:
“But I didn’t want to go near the kids while they were naked. Finally
Kane got up and put a washcloth in my hand” (231).
In Little Altars Everywhere, sexual abuse is verified by the children
among themselves and revealed to the reader primarily by Little Shep,
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233
who offers insights into what may have occurred between Vivi and her
other children. The siblings support each other by attesting to the fact
of abuse and discussing its implications for themselves as adults. For
example, after Little Shep wonders to himself (and, by implication,
the reader)—“Did she do the same thing with Baylor?” (232)—the
next page implies that sexual abuse occurred with both sons and that
there are consequences of this seen in Baylor’s sexual dysfunction as an
adult. On an outing at the duck camp, Baylor reveals to his brother:
“Bro’, most of the time I can’t even get it up. When I do, I just want
to do it and get it over with” (233). Baylor’s inseparability from Pecan
Grove is also evidence of the effects of trauma. Unlike Sidda, whose
reaction to abuse is escape, Baylor is confined by the experience. He
tells his “big sister, I am entombed here. I will not get out of this town
[Thornton] until I die” (261). The various segments in Little Altars
Everywhere function as testimonials of abusive child-rearing and the
results.6
In 1990 Sidda, in her late thirties and entering early middle-age,
is still querying her brother Baylor over the facts of their childhood:
“Bay, . . . you’re the one who told me I didn’t make it up. It all happened” (263). The chapter title “Willetta’s Witness: Willetta, 1990”
(207) foregrounds the aspect of verification of events that is necessary
in order for Sidda to reclaim from her unconscious and bring into conscious play her tortured childhood. “Watching,” “Seeing,” “Witnessing” are repeated words in “Willetta’s Witness.” Vivi’s black servants,
Chaney, Willetta, and their daughters, Pearl and Ruby, hear and see
Vivi attack the naked children: “I done heard them chilren screamin
fore my eye even seen what was goin on. All four of my babies lined up
against the wall of that brick house and every one of them buck naked.
Miz Vivi out there with a belt, whuppin them like horses. And them
just standin against the red brick. Yellin and cryin and screamin, but
not even tryin to get away from her” (223). While Buggy instructs Willetta and Chaney—“I don’t want a word of this to go any further than
this house, yall hear me?” (227)—and Shep “never sa[ys] . . . nothin
at all” (228), Shep gives Chaney “his gold El Camino” automobile
(228), a form of symbolic exchange that seems to recognize Willetta
and Chaney’s intervention on behalf of the children. Vivi’s scrapbook
contains information like the witnessing of Willetta that is evidence
and confirmation of memory for each of the Abbott Walker children
and is essential for Sidda’s return to health and functioning.
“I got to keep my gaze on them chilren till the day I die,” says
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Willetta (228), even though she has two daughters and eventually grandchildren of her own. Chaney reminds Willetta that she is a “niggerwoman” (223), and Vivi insists that Chaney (“filthy nigger” [224]) not
touch her and that Willetta not interfere with raising the Abbott Walker
children. However, Willetta speaks her mind. She states simply: “That
aint how you raise no child!” (210), unlike the white community, of
which she says, “Aint nobody in this town gonna say nothin to nobody
bout the way they raise they chilren” (221). Willetta sees the children as
hers—“All four of my babies”—while Vivi dismisses this possibility by
racializing Chaney and Willetta (219, 224) when they intervene in support of the children. Meanwhile, lack of recognition of the inequitable
position of the African American family and the bitterness it creates
within herself disturbs Willetta: “This [racial inequality] is somethin
what haunt me when I pray, somethin I can’t forgive” (227).
Figures are also demarcated according to faith. Willetta reinterprets
the notion of sin as a matter of conscience, not rigid principles fixed by
the Church. She denigrates the impact of the Catholic Church on Vivi
and dismisses the institution: “Well, I got my own thought bout what
kind of church say boots [in the sanctuary] be sinful” (215). Willetta
notes that while Vivi “done start up listin sins for the chilren” (215),
“she don’t know nothin bout the Lord of mercy” (217). Buggy sees
the culprit as “that Baptist husband of hers! [Vivi’s]” (227). Willetta
does not forgo the Christian faith but instead identifies her own “good
church home” where “they look out for you when you in need” (228).
In order to appease his guilt and exercise his power to silence Chaney
and Willetta after Vivi beats the children, Shep gives them a second
vehicle “that coulda took us anywhere we wanted to go.” However,
they do not leave Pecan Grove and their responsibilities to the family:
“But even though I ain’t a big one for countin sins, leavin outta here
woulda been a sin in my book” (228). Thus Willetta differentiates
between sins and highlights those committed out of omission.
Willetta and Chaney remain at Pecan Grove throughout their lives
keeping watch over the family’s welfare. Willetta describes the nature
of Vivi’s instability: more than Vivi’s drunkenness, Willetta estimates
“she [Vivi] crazy as a Betsy bug.” Finally, Willetta recognizes the longterm effects of abuse on the children: “Sweet Jesus, I seen they whole
lives in front of them, how they would be when they was grown. I seen
it all just by lookin at them right that minute in that yard” (225).
In leaving Pecan Grove, Sidda creates for herself a community in
the theater, where she becomes capable of transcending Pecan Grove’s
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235
insular, contained life. Here she dramatizes her own existence, including her relations with Vivi, her tormented mother. It is because Sidda’s
life and work is performative that she lets slip the detail about her beltwielding mother. Sidda lives in the moment that she creates, whereas
Vivi stumbles uncontrollably through an existence from which she
cannot escape, and Buggy blindly lives in shadows composed of strict
religious morals. Hope is signaled by Sidda’s decision to marry and
thus change the abusive family tradition. In the end, she is in effect
accepting her personal history and the challenge to change it over her
life course. While child abuse is perennial in this family (including Sidda’s father’s side, as well), there is hope as abuse becomes less prevalent
among Sidda’s siblings, while Sidda uses language and, especially, the
theater to articulate her difference from her predecessors. In the theater
Sidda has facilitated cathartic alternative roles on stage and played
new roles for herself among friends. As her costume designer Wade
Coenen notes, in pouring Sidda a comforting glass of brandy, “Glorious theater. It creates family for all kinds of orphans” (Divine Secrets
182). Sidda’s stamina is tested when her fiancé, Connor, suggests that
she consider her mother as a figure in a play: “He held the [scrap]book
up closer to Sidda’s face. ‘Look at them. Look at them like you look at
actors, without yourself in the way’” (312). At this point Sidda cannot
imagine her family scene without herself as central to the plot.
Part of her discovery on the pathway to spiritual healing and recovery requires a revaluation of power. Events would have unfolded as
they did regardless of her role; however, as a result of growing up at
Pecan Grove, she still must cope with the consequences of abuse. Caro
insists, “You’ve got Ya-Ya blood, Siddalee. Whether you like it or not.
And sure, it’s tainted” (Divine Secrets 305).
Sidda must learn to balance acceptance of her past with the ability
to become detached from it. This part of her spiritual journey takes
her back to positive aspects of her youth when, in 1963, at the Girl
Scout camp overseen by the Ya-Ya Sisters, she had an illumination: “I
see all the ordinary stuff . . . lit up from inside so their everyday selves
have holy sparks in them, and if people could only see those sparks,
they’d go and kneel in front of them and pray and just feel good. Somehow the whole world looks like little altars everywhere” (Little Altars
22). Sidda’s journey back into the Ya-Ya fold recovers not only the
guilt-encompassed altars of Our Lady of Divine Compassion parochial
school but also, importantly, untainted, visionary altars, which are a
source of creativity and hope.
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Reconciliation and Hope
While the scrapbook may facilitate Sidda’s “return of [adjusted] memory” (Schwarz 40) and her marriage (her personal way of writing herself into social practice), Sidda’s own testimony in her New York Times
interview in the 1990s implies the possibility of legal action. Within the
purview of the story, though, it is perhaps opening the personal into
the social realm that causes Vivi’s shame and punishment (in the construction of a Ya-Ya Native healing circle). In an effort to restore her
own dignity, which is affronted by the fact of child abuse, Vivi attempts
to exclude the victim. As in tribal justice, it is Vivi who is temporarily
ostracized by her soul mates. The Ya-Yas who are witnesses to each
family’s commingled existence, including their misery, know that the
words, images, and objects that are part of the scrapbook will assist
Sidda with “reestablishing dialogue between [her]self and [the] world”
(ibid.). The facticity represented by the Ya-Ya scrapbook, its referential
bias, is required in order for Sidda to test the validity of family frames
of understanding that do not mirror her recollections. If the family
image has been emptied of relevant experience, Sidda’s self-image will
be incomplete. Her mother’s social guilt has managed to erase relevant
experience that her daughter needs to know about.
Vivi is sorrowful for the suffering she inflicted on her children, and
she mourns her daughter’s absence, which is a consequence of abuse.
Teensy asks Vivi during her separation from Sidda, “Don’t you miss
her?” to which Vivi replies, “I miss Sidda horribly. I think about her
all the time” (Divine Secrets 255–56). Sidda is accepting her mother’s
sorrow when she brings her mother the gift of a lachrymatory at her
wedding to Connor, which occurs at Pecan Grove at the end of Divine
Secrets: “A tiny jar of tear drops. In olden days it was one of the greatest
gifts you could give someone. It meant you loved them, that you shared
a grief that brought you together” (348). The Ya-Ya circle remains
torn until Vivi and Sidda rejoin it by reconciling over their “grief” at
the wedding. Through the concern over her daughter’s psychological
well-being, Vivi grows as an emotionally charged human being, but
she does not change the direction of her journey. Vivi understands her
limitations and differences from Sidda as generational. In Vivi’s words,
“I was born before you could do what you wanted” (Little Altars 315).
Vivi’s patterns of interaction are interpersonal within her growing multigenerational family and with her Ya-Ya friends—affectively communicating that she has done harm, which she is trying to ameliorate on
Chapter 9: A Ya-Ya Scrapbook
237
a personal level.7 In the prewedding gift exchange between Sidda and
Vivi, Vivi gives Sidda her sweet-sixteen ring, which was a gift, symbolizing female maturity, to Vivi from her father and which her mother
Buggy wanted to deny by taking the ring away. Signifying the completion of the healing circle, the ring given to Sidda also symbolizes her
mature capacity to change her life by continuing to develop within the
Ya-Ya circle, but in ways different from Buggy’s and Vivi’s examples.
The stories kept by the Ya-Yas, now older women, provide a mediating factor for cleansing and healing in subsequent generations. Repetition compulsion toward domestic failure prevented Sidda from going
ahead with her marriage plans. However, with the reading of the scrapbook, what before was the “stagnant,” dredged-up, traumatic past
becomes available for Sidda’s scrutiny and use.8 The Ya-Ya relationships revealed in the scrapbook have developed over generations and
are a rich source of what Habermas refers to as “meaning-potential”
for the future (215).9 The fullness of Willetta and Chaney’s viewpoint
and the abundance of the old women’s history that is etched in the
scrapbook are implied also by Constance Rooke’s introductory comments to Night Light: Stories of Aging. According to Rooke, “The old
person is an especially useful protagonist since he or she makes available to the writer nearly the whole span of a life history—as opposed
to just that truncated, glibly predictive bit before the heroine decides
whom to marry” (ix). These remarks speak to Rebecca Wells’s novels,
which represent the life spans of at least eight characters of advanced
years—particularly those of the four Ya-Yas, but also Willetta, Chaney,
Buggy, and Shep.
By way of the newly found evidence that wants processing by
Sidda (and reevaluation by the Ya-Yas in her company), Sidda’s trajectory forward into marriage circles back to her own childhood and
the Ya-Yas’ youth in the 1960s recounted in the first half of Little
Altars Everywhere. In this way Wells’s Ya-Ya fiction subscribes to the
circular staircase model that Rooke sees in stories of aging (xi). Moving forward with Sidda’s life requires circling back through a process
that revisits the lives of her father, the Ya-Yas, Buggy, and Chaney and
Willetta. Similarly, the theme of turning suffering into love—modeled in present-day healing circles, truth commissions, and other ritual practices—developed throughout Rebecca Wells’s texts and the
film version of Divine Secrets circles back to the epigraph of Little
Altars Everywhere: “Everything in life that we really accept undergoes
a change. So suffering must become love.” Communication facilitates
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change and love, which characterize Sidda’s growth. Interest in the
goings-on within Thornton, Louisiana, extends far beyond the southern American states. The mostly female followers of the wildly popular
Ya-Ya material make use of the stories about Sidda and her mother
and family in their own lives. On the lively Rebecca Wells Internet site,
evidence of a similar back-and-forth process is found in the response
and engagement of readers, both with the explosive themes in her fiction and with each other.
Notes
1. Shoshana Felman defines and gives examples of psychological trauma:
“Psychological trauma occurs as a result of an overwhelming, uncontrollable
and terrifying experience, usually a violent event or events or the prolonged exposure to such events. The emotional damage often remains hidden, as though
the person were unharmed. The full scope of the symptoms manifests itself
only belatedly, sometimes years and years later. The trigger of the symptoms
is often an event that unconsciously reminds the subject of the original traumatic scene, and is thus lived as a repetition of the trauma. Trauma thus results
in lifelong psychological liabilities, and continues to have delayed aftereffects
throughout one’s existence. Classic examples of traumatic catalysts include
wars, concentration camp experiences, prison experiences, terrorism incidents,
auto and industrial accidents, and childhood traumas such as incest or sexual
and physical abuse” (171). I am indebted to Jeanie Warnock, whose work
sparked my interest in trauma studies, and to Phyllis Sternberg Perrakis, editor
and friend.
2.Author-actress Rebecca Wells had her own experience of trauma—she began writing novels after an injury prevented her from acting (Little Altars xvii).
3. Dominick LaCapra spells out the relationship between memory and
trauma, in a way that is helpful for grasping the inevitability of trauma resurfacing—in Sidda’s case, during an interview celebrating her career. “Yet the memory
lapses of trauma are conjoined with the tendency compulsively to repeat, relive,
be possessed by, or act out traumatic scenes of the past, whether in more or less
controlled artistic procedures or in uncontrolled existential experiences of hallucination, flashback, dream, and retraumatizing breakdown triggered by incidents that more or less obliquely recall the past. In this sense, what is denied or
repressed in a lapse of memory does not disappear; it returns in a transformed,
at times disfigured and disguised manner” (10).
4. Caruth identifies the mediating function of the encounter with the “other,” in this case eventually Sidda’s mother, as crucial for healing, as “one’s own
trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, [and] . . . may lead, therefore, to
the encounter with another” (8).
5. Laing and Esterson investigate psychopathology in order to separate out
roles that individuals perform in dysfunctional families: “The way in which a
family deploys itself in space and time, what space, what time, and what things
Chapter 9: A Ya-Ya Scrapbook
239
are private or shared, and by whom—these and many other questions are best
answered by seeing what sort of world the family has itself fleshed out for itself,
both as a whole and differentially for each of its members” (21). In her reflections, while reading the scrapbook, Sidda is in effect performing an analysis of
herself within the Walker family. According to Hayden White, with reference to
psychotherapy: “The problem is to get the patient to ‘reemplot’ his whole life
history in such a way as to change the meaning of those events for him and their
significance for . . . the whole set of events that make up his life. . . . We might
say that the events are detraumatized by being removed from the plot structure
in which they have a dominant place and inserted in another in which they have
a subordinate or simply ordinary function as elements of a life shared with all
other [women and] men” (87, emphasis in original).
6. For a wide-ranging discussion of the forms and implications of testimony, see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in
Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History.
7.In conclusion, it seems necessary to note another pattern at play in the
series, a progressive movement toward personal independence from lives determined by traumatic events—war, sexual and physical abuse, and racism, for instance. Ya-Yas in Bloom includes the first, second, and third generations of YaYas in the ending, an extended family Christmas celebration. The event shows
that eventually the suffering of Little Altars Everywhere has been considerably
diffused, that suffering is being worked through now that the past has been admitted.
8. Little Shep gives special significance to the word stagnant. Making allusion to the extent of child abuse in Pecan Grove, he recalls “that brick house on
the bayou,” his childhood home, “that stinking bayou of thick brown water that
didn’t move. Stagnant water that was full of shit you couldn’t see, couldn’t guess
at, didn’t even want to know about” (Little Altars 239).
9.Habermas’s theory of communicative competence could help us classify
the hope that is signaled by keeping memory alive and responsibly passing it on
to Sidda. In his view, “this transfer of semantic contents from the prelinguistic
into the common stock of language widens the scope of communicative action as
it diminishes that of unconsciously motivated action” (215).
Works Cited
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood [film]. Dir. Callie Khouri. Perf. Ellen
Burstyn, Ashley Judd, Sandra Bullock, James Garner, and Maggie Smith.
Warner Bros., 2002.
Felman, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002.
Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Fiske, John. “Popular Culture.” In Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., ed.
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Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 321–35. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1995.
Habermas, Jürgen. “On Systematically Distorted Communication.” Inquiry 13
(1970): 205–18.
Henke, Suzette A. Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s LifeWriting. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
UP, 1998.
Laing, R. D. The Politics of the Family and Other Essays. London: Tavistock,
1971.
Laing, R. D., and A. Esterson. Sanity, Madness, and the Family: Families of
Schizophrenics. 1964. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1970.
Poster, Mark. What’s the Matter with the Internet? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 2001.
Rooke, Constance, ed. Night Light: Stories of Aging. Toronto: Oxford UP,
1986.
Schwarz, Daniel R. Imagining the Holocaust. New York: St. Martin’s, 1999.
Shields, Carol, and Marjorie Anderson, eds. Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t
Told. Toronto: Vintage, 2001.
Shields, Carol, Marjorie Anderson, and Catherine Shields, eds. Dropped Threads
2: More of What We Aren’t Told. Toronto: Vintage, 2003.
Steinfeld, J. J. “Would You Hide Me?” In Would You Hide Me? 9–16. Kentville,
NS: Gaspereau, 2003.
Wells, Rebecca. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. 1996. New York: Harper
& Row, 1997.
———. Les divins secrets des petites Ya-Ya. Trans. Dominique Rinaudo. 1998.
Paris: Pocket, 2000.
———. Little Altars Everywhere. 1992. New York: Harper & Row, 2003.
———.“Valentine’s Day, 2003.” Accessed August 28, 2004. http://www.yaya.com/welcome.htm.
———. The Ya-Ya Audio Collection. New York: Harper & Row, 1999.
———. “Ya-Ya Notes from Cane Country.” Accessed August 28, 2004. http://
www.ya-ya.com/welcome.htm.
———. Ya-Yas in Bloom. New York: Harper & Row, 2005.
White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1978.
C hapter 10
Surviving the Colonialist Legacy of
the Klondike Gold Rush
A Native Woman Elder’s Liberatory
and Integrative Storytelling Turn
S usan B erry B rill de R am í rez
How does a traditional Native American elder in the Yukon maintain a spiritual balance in the face of the catastrophic consequences
of Euroamerican colonization, and what is the intriguing yet crucial
role that stories play in that process of personal and tribal survivance?
Angela Sidney’s life spanned the Klondike gold rush era and most of
the twentieth century, encompassing the development of tribal colleges
and a renowned international storytelling festival hosted annually in
Whitehorse that she helped cofound and in which she regularly participated during her later years. She told her ethnographer, Julie Cruik­
shank, “Well, I’ve tried to live my life right, just like a story” (Life
Lived 20). In these few words, Sidney communicates her people’s oral
storytelling heuristic that demonstrates ways of living for tribal members’ consideration, learning, and application. As Native American
writer and oral tradition scholar Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo)
expresses at the outset of her novel Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories,
...
They aren’t just entertainment.
Don’t be fooled.
They are all we have, you see,
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all we have to fight off
illness and death. (2)
For Sidney, her fellow indigenous elders in the Yukon, and many of the
indigenous peoples of the world, there is a deep and enduring valuation
of the power that stories exert for the health, balance, and integrity of
persons, families, clans, tribes, and communities. As Silko makes very
clear, stories are far more than mere entertainment; they provide a
crucial means for the transmission of tribal and family history, moral
and ethical guidance, and spiritual and ceremonial practice.
In Cruikshank’s volume Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of
Three Yukon Native Elders, the three Native women elders all affirm
the sacred station held by words, speech, and stories. One of the
women, Annie Ned, was described as “a powerful figure in southern
Yukon society, where she has lived for almost a century . . . and is
recognized throughout the Yukon as having special knowledge about
spiritual power”; Ned stresses “the power of words . . . [and] the value
of discretion,” noting “that only a fool speaks indiscriminately [and
that] the inappropriate use of words can bring serious consequences
to both speaker and listener” (355). Within an aboriginal worldview,
stories and their words are understood to wield both creative and
destructive power. The speaker of language and the teller of stories
have great responsibilities in the choice of their words, but the conversive (conversational and transforming) nature of oral storytelling
means that listeners, too, wield co-creative control in their respective
fleshing out of the told stories. When Cruikshank sought to record the
autobiographies of Native women elders in the Yukon Territory of
Canada, the women made it very clear that storytelling among their
people was understood to be symbolically coded with multiple and
overlapping meanings which are interwoven throughout and which
require the co-creative effort on the part of the listener-reader for
meaningful understanding. Silko confirms the listener’s active participation in stating that the story lies within the listeners, waiting for the
storyteller’s assisted unearthing—much like Socrates’ description of the
oral philosopher as a midwife (“Language” 57).
The stories that the old Yukon women related can be broadly delineated within the categories of personal life histories and traditional
tribal or clan myths; however, in the custom of skilled and guiding
storytellers, the stories that the women chose to tell (whether traditional or historical) offer explicit and implicit life lessons, which are
Chapter 10: Surviving the Colonialist Legacy
243
invariably informed by the ancient and sacred teachings of the women’s respective tribes and clans. The older aboriginal women pointed
out that “practical and spiritual knowledge are inextricably enmeshed:
women used the same sets of abilities to confront transcendent beings
and to survive in everyday life” (Life Lived 344). Therefore, the ethical
and moral guidance within stories, whether they were mythical or historical, was directly relevant to the women’s lives (and, more broadly,
for virtually any person’s life). This chapter presents an introduction to
ethnographically produced Native women’s autobiography through
the storytelling lens of one of the Native women elders: Tagish/Tlingit elder Angela Sidney. By means of a close conversive reading of
several of her stories, the sacred center of those stories will be seen to
emerge from behind the surface texts of traditional myths and historical stories of the Klondike gold rush, Euroamerican and Eurocanadian
colonization, missionization, residential schools, and tribal and familial continuance. While Sidney affirms the importance that the sacred
has manifested throughout her life, in her later years as a Bahá’í, her
spiritual trajectory has led toward an integrative globalism enabling
her to maintain and interweave her faith in her tribal sacred traditions
and the Anglican Church in a postcolonial coherence.
The past five-hundred-year history of global European colonization
and conquest privileged the realms of geopolitical resource appropriations (land, mineral, vegetation, human) and religious conversion. An
inclusive openness and recognition of the different approaches to the
sacred across tribes led many indigenous Americans (lexically signifying a broad hemispheric demographic) to respond to Christian missionization with a theological sophistication that few Europeans or
subsequent Euroamericans could comprehend. Many Native peoples
embraced what they saw as spiritual truths within Christianity, while
still maintaining faith in their tribal sacred traditions (Contemporary
American, Brill de Ramírez 96–115), notwithstanding the fact that
church theologies posited an exclusivity that bespoke a spiritual worldview categorically divergent from that of the indigenous affirmation of
the sacred in its diverse manifestations. In God Is Red: A Native View
of Religion, historian Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) explains
that Native people understood that different peoples and tribes had
different sacred practices and teachings and that each tribe’s religion
was comparable in truth value to that of every other tribe: “No tribe,
however, asserted its [religious and tribal] history as having primacy
over the accounts of any other tribe. . . . Differing tribal accounts [of
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creation and oral tradition] were given credence because it was not
a matter of trying to establish power over others to claim absolute
truth” (100). Such openness of religious diversity contrasted significantly with the church dogma and missionary zeal that precluded
acceptance of the validity of indigenous sacred tradition.
In light of the destructive religious history of the missionization of
aboriginal peoples,1 religious studies professor Jace Weaver (Cherokee) notes, “Remarkably, despite brutality, a great many Natives did
willingly embrace the alien faith, and some of them went on to carry
the message to others” (Native American 5; also Other Words 285).
Stan McKay, a Cree member of the United Church of Canada, offers
his First Nations perspective regarding the similarities that he notes
among traditional Native beliefs and the ancient tribal teachings of
the Hebrew people as related in the Old Testament: “We, like them,
come out of an oral tradition which is rooted in the Creator and the
creation. We, like Moses, know about the sacredness of the earth and
the promise of land. Our creation stories also emphasize the power
of the Creator and the goodness of creation” (qtd. in Treat 52). Like
McKay and many of the other indigenous peoples of the Americas
(especially throughout Latin America), Sidney’s spiritual beliefs and
practice included a delicate combination of Christianity and aboriginal sacred ways, notwithstanding her experiences with the hegemonic
impositions of colonialist missionization in the Yukon.
The Anglican Church was the central Christianizing force in Sidney’s life: “Shortly before Angela’s birth, the Anglican Church had
established a mission at Carcross, where it set up a residential school
known as Chooutla school” (Life Lived 31). Throughout her life Sidney was active in both church activities and her tribal and clan sacred
traditions. Although the church presented itself in contradistinction
to indigenous belief, Sidney’s traditional openness and inclusiveness
enabled her to embrace both traditions as aspects of one overarching
realm of the sacred. Her lifelong commitment to the sacred makes it
not so surprising that, late in life, she would follow a number of her
relatives in accepting the holistic teachings of the Bahá’í Faith, in which
she found an affirmation of the sacred in its myriad and diverse forms.
Cruikshank explains that Sidney “has become actively involved in the
Bahá’í faith. She has paid a great deal of attention to reconciling her
present beliefs with the shamanistic ideas she learned from her parents, uncles, and aunts, and with her own longstanding membership
in the Anglican Church. Her account has a splendid coherence, and as
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245
usual, she makes narrative connections between events in her past and
present life” (Life Lived 36). Sidney specifically points to prophetic
statements of a tribal elder who lived prior to the colonization of the
Yukon. She and her relatives believe that the Bahá’í Faith represents
the fulfillment of the prophecies of a renowned Pelly River medicine
man (ibid. 154–58).
For Sidney and many of the world’s aboriginal peoples, the sacred
is very simply and profoundly a way of living. Sidney draws on her
knowledge of traditional storytelling to understand how the people are
to live, including those stories’ moral and ethical imperatives and their
respective senses of tribal, clan, family, and regional history. Within
such an interpretive frame, Sidney interrelates “two prophecy narratives” to show “that intellectually there is no necessary conflict between
Anglicanism, Bahá’í, and indigenous shamanism. She is able to use this
framework to provide an entirely satisfactory explanation of her ability
to integrate ideas that others might find contradictory” (Cruik­shank,
Social Life 133). The colonial missionization of the Yukon brought
Christianity to the aboriginal peoples of that region, and as a result the
people were introduced to religious doctrine that privileged particular
Christian denominations at the expense of other religious and sacred
practices. While Sidney did accept the truth of Christianity and was an
active member of the Anglican Church, she also maintained her faith
and participation in her aboriginal sacred traditions. Contented with
her separate faiths in Christianity and tribal ways and having been
taught church exclusivity, Sidney initially resisted becoming involved
in the Bahá’í Faith: “I think I was the last one joined in because I’m
Anglican. All of my kids joined the Bahá’í. That’s why I joined in, me,
too” (Life Lived 155). She points out a number of reasons for her
acceptance of the Bahá’í Faith: the importance of a unified extended
family participation, past tribal prophecies, and a belief in religious
inclusiveness. As she related to Cruikshank, “When I think about that
Baha’i faith [sic], it just brings back remembrance of that old Major
[the shaman], what he said. I think about it. . . . That’s why I joined
it. But still Baha’i never told us to quit going to church. . . . I sure like
to go to church, keep up my old religion” (ibid. 158). As a highly
respected traditional elder, Sidney comes to the Bahá’í Faith finding a
sacred way that confirms her tribal and Christian faiths by means of
a postcolonial global inclusiveness that enables her to rise above the
divisive views and consequences of the Eurocanadian colonial missionization of the Yukon.
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At the surface levels of ritual, dogma, and practice, the dichotomies between the three faith-based traditions would make Sidney’s
embrace of all three patently mystifying to many; yet through the
deeper storytelling lens of the religious traditions’ conversive roots,
Sidney finds each focused on a lived relationship with/in the sacred,
all of creation, and a creator—regardless of each faith’s respective cultural, geographic, and historical differences. Sidney well understood
the diversity of the world’s cultures: as a Native woman whose life
spanned the twentieth-century Yukon, her life and world were defined
by the intersections of Russian, American, Canadian, and aboriginal
worlds. As a traditional Native elder, she also understood the deeply
rooted interconnections that pervaded what she saw to be an inherently and intricately interdependent world. Her family’s involvement
in the Bahá’í Faith demonstrates a worldmindedness that coheres a
diversity of experience within the scope of the sacred as understood in
both conversively interwoven and historically diverse ways.
In spite of her global awareness, commitment, and activities late in
life (and perhaps also because of all this), Sidney’s life and stories are
expressly elucidative of her times and tribal cultures. As Cruikshank
notes, “Mrs. Sidney is well known in the southern Yukon as a narrator
of traditional stories and as a teacher of Tagish and Tlingit customs”
(qtd. in Sidney, Place Names 1). In fact, Sidney was one of the cofounders of the Yukon International Storytelling Festival, in Whitehorse,
with its strong emphasis on the traditional cultures of the diverse
yet interrelated circumpolar regions; Sidney was an active storytelling
participant at the festival even in the final year of her life (1991). She
worked tirelessly with Cruikshank to record stories and information
about her people that she felt important for future generations—producing many collected volumes such as Tagish Tlaagú: Tagish Stories
(1982). Her stories straddle the realms of ancient and precolonial
indigenous America and the subsequent and continuing colonial realities of contemporary Canada and the United States (with the Yukon
spanning both nations).
An interpretive turn to the conversive accesses several of Sidney’s
life history and traditional stories, opening their storyworlds to their
listener-readers with the intimacy of a familial storytelling circle, welcoming a diversity of readers who might otherwise be alienated from
the stories by virtue of distances in geography, culture, language, and
times. Regardless of the ostensive content of her stories, each story
invariably revolves around its sacred center that holds all together
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247
within its centripetal attractive force. As Weaver affirms, Native American sacred traditions manifest a distinctively “communal character”
that he contrasts with the Christian emphasis on personal salvation:
“Native religious traditions are not practiced for personal empowerment or fulfillment but rather to ensure the corporate good” (Native
American Religious Identity 21). For Sidney, the mere act of sharing
her stories is a means whereby she consciously intends to perpetuate
the integrity of her people’s traditions and values. Deloria explains that
this indigenous sense of community welfare holistically embraces the
whole of creation—with each person’s integrative commitment to live
in concord “with other living things and to develop the self-discipline
within the tribal community so that man acts harmoniously with other
creatures . . . [understanding that humans] are dependent on everything in creation for their existence” (88). Sidney’s stories are oriented
within a very clearly defined geography and sense of spatial belonging,
which are also the sites of familial and tribal devastation at the hands
of the colonizing powers. Yet even in the poignantly painful stories
of her people’s colonization and the tragic effects on her own family,
Sidney’s stories speak a sacred center that welcomes and embraces all.
She shares her stories in the powerfully moving voice of a conversive
storyteller who wants her readers to step into her stories and experience them from within, understanding the events deeply and empathically and, with her, emerging from those stories with new vision by
which we, too, can orient our lives. In this fashion, we are invited into
a decidedly non-Western world where older women’s stories and relationships provide the mainstays of their people’s sacred centers. As
such, we engage a sacred vision of the world that articulates an applied
spirituality to be manifested in consciously interrelational and interdependent ways of living. Several of Sidney’s stories provide examples of
the sort of interpersonal spirituality by which she guides her life, but
in light of the collaboratively ethnographic process of recording her
stories for textual publication, it is necessary to document that process
in order to show her ownership of the stories and her conversive craft
in their telling.
Native American Autobiography,
Ethnography, and Conversive Storytelling
At what point do a Native American woman’s stories that emanate
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from her own life experiences fit within the reifying boundaries of
“autobiography” and “ethnography,” and what tools do readers need
in order to understand those stories within the respective familial,
tribal, regional, and sociohistorical origins of the tales? Through a
conversively informed listening-reading approach, readers can begin to
step through the ethnographically constructed text in order to access
their originating stories. As readers and interpreters of any ethnography, we have great responsibilities in how we respond to that material.
The conversive (co-creative, relational, transformative) nature of storytelling invites an interactive participation in the stories that lie beyond
the textual surface. As I explain elsewhere, at the center of conversive
communications are relationships; the term “conversive” conveys both
senses of “transformational and regenerative power (conversion) and
the intersubjective relationality between the storyteller and listener
(conversation)” (Contemporary American, Brill de Ramírez 6–7). This
can be seen in the various conversive structures and strategies used by
storytellers, “such as the privileging of relationality over individuality,
domains in which meaningfulness is defined relationally rather than
semiotically, voice shifts that reflect the presence and necessity of participatory listener-readers, and repetition for learning rather than for
memorization” (ibid. 6). But this requires conversive reading (listening) strategies on the part of readers and conversive mediating strategies on the part of ethnographers and editors in order to facilitate
Native storytellers’ storytelling on paper.2
Kevin Dwyer asserts that anthropology “creates otherness and
objectifies it” (142). While this is true, it is not invariably the case. In
the collaboratively constructed volume Life Lived Like a Story, Cruik­
shank assisted three Native women elders in transmitting their stories
through a textual medium. Cruikshank took great pains to work with
three First Nations women elders in the Yukon (Angela Sidney, Kitty
Smith, and Annie Ned) in helping them record whatever stories they
chose to relate and preserve for their children, grandchildren, future
descendants, and other readers. In the development of this volume
(and the other publications produced from her time in the Yukon),
from start to finish, Cruikshank’s work centered on the establishment
of deep and enduring relationships with those with whom she worked.
This distinctive aspect of the project led to a very empowered, open,
and willing storytelling on the part of these old grandmothers, who felt
sufficiently comfortable to refocus the direction and method of their
work with Cruikshank when necessary.3
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All three of the Native women with whom Cruikshank worked
took their respective responsibilities for the volume very seriously.
In their storytelling, they include many conversive strategies to help
their listeners and listener-readers become part of the stories—and
this becoming is the crucial transformative step toward meaningful
and deep understandings of the stories. In contrast to texts, Native
American oral stories are to be understood conversively from within.
A number of diverse yet interrelated literary critical reading strategies
can move us toward this end, but to access the range of co-creatively
reciprocal and lived storytelling meaning, the reader must become a
listening-reading participant and find meaning, thereby, from a lived
interaction with the story from within (Contemporary American, Brill
de Ramírez 6–7, 129–54).4 All three of the Native women storytellers use voice shifts, conjunctions of diverse times and places, episodic
and associational structurings, conjunctions of the everyday and the
mythic, personification of nonhumans, emphatic expressions and
silences, song and prayer, and additional explanations of details in
the stories that listeners might need. Interestingly, all of these strategies are employed at different points in their stories and not only in
the traditional stories or myths but also in the more everyday stories
about their own lives and experiences. Through the lived relationships established among the three Native women elders and Julie
Cruikshank, all four of the women’s voices come through clearly,
directly, and honestly, regardless of the layers of textual mediation
involved in the ethnographic process.5
Cruikshank explains that all three of the women maintained control
over what they chose to relate. In response to direct questions about
their own lives, more often than not the women would tell stories that
rarely were straightforward answers to the original questions. These
answers, often crafted in the aporetic and open-ended form of stories,
shifted the discussion away from the discursive realm of information
and toward the conversive domain of meaning. Cruikshank explains
this part of their working process by noting, “Although the older
women responded patiently to my line of inquiry for a while, they
quite firmly shifted the emphasis to ‘more important’ accounts they
wanted me to record—particularly events central to traditional narrative” (Life Lived 14). For these women, clearly the larger and deeper
meanings of traditional stories were seen as much more important than
the more limited scope of the specific details of their lives. What the
women chose to emphasize were stories rather than information.
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In response to Cruikshank’s requests for lived histories from the
gold rush era of the Yukon, what Cruikshank received were cryptic traditional stories with little obvious connection to that historical
period. While Life Lived Like a Story asserts its emphasis on the old
women’s stories, the book’s presentation emphasizes Cruikshank’s initiating historical agenda in which she sought information “that might
contribute to land claims negotiations” (June 24, 2000, letter). As
Cruikshank explicitly notes, the traditional stories offered in response
to her questions at first confused her until she was able to take those
stories and interpret them as explanations about parts of the women’s
own lives (Life Lived 15). Thereby, the book as a whole appears to be
primarily focused on the women’s own personal life histories, but as
a conversive listening-reading approach demonstrates, the larger focus
and orientation of the book and its stories are rooted within the very
historical inquiry that began the project in the first place, namely, the
Klondike gold rush. Sidney and the other women consciously chose to
tell the story of the gold rush deeply and meaningfully through carefully selected and intricately interwoven life history and mythic stories.
When read conversively, the volume Life Lived Like a Story becomes
a powerfully moral tale about the ways by which people can survive
cataclysmic upheavals, such as the hurried gold rush colonization of
the lands and peoples of the Yukon (perhaps with Bear representing
Russian presence as well).
A close look at one of Sidney’s “traditional” stories will help clarify
the conversive process of oral storytelling that, on paper, invites reader
participation as co-creative listener-readers. As Silko explains, “The
storytelling always includes the audience and the listeners, and, in fact,
a great deal of the story is believed to be inside the listener, and the
storytellers’ role is to draw the story out of the listeners” (“Language”
57). Cruikshank confirms this specifically in relation to Sidney’s craft:
“Angela Sidney understood, as only the most talented storytellers can,
the importance of performance—how performance involves not simply
a narrator but also an audience, and how narrator and audience both
change with time and circumstances, giving any one story the potential range of meanings that all good stories have” (Social Life 28). To
understand stories is to engage with them in the close intersubjective
manner of conversive relations. When we interpret stories that are told
to us from the distanced lens of outside observers, not recognizing the
extent to which we, as story-listeners, are participants in the stories as
much as are the storyteller and story characters, then the stories, their
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characters, and their events often appear “bewildering” to us (Life
Lived 15). What is required, however, is to move the reading process
away from the objectifying “artifaction” of Native women’s lives and
toward a conversation between the listener-reader, the Native women
storytellers, their stories, and their ethnographer-editor. As Hertha D.
Sweet Wong explains, “numerous kinds of relational subjectivities are
possible, that a subject . . . may be more or less individual or more or
less relational in diverse contexts” (168). Each of the women elders’
stories is interconnected and interwoven, in light of the women’s own
interwoven lives, the interwoven historicity of their stories, and the
interwoven nature of stories. This requires readers who will reorient
their expectations of a primary focus on the women’s lives with the
traditional mythic stories as a gloss and, instead, approach all of the
stories as interrelated parts of the larger stories of human survival,
Yukon colonization, and indigenous sacred expression.
Continuance Through Tragedy
in the Story “How People Got Flint”
As one of the most well-known storytellers in the Yukon, Angela Sidney was still at the height of her storytelling craft when she worked
with Cruikshank. Our attention to her stories echoes their importance
among her people, for in the Yukon most of the First Nations storytellers are women (Life Lived 346–47) analogous to the old women
griottes of Africa, whose wealth of stories are viewed as extensive
libraries. In Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha notes that “the
World’s earliest archives or libraries were the memories of women”
and that the death of each griotte is the equivalent loss of “a whole
library” (121). Although Sidney’s stories are presented as life-history
narratives, their relevance and meaningfulness are much broader. In
the tradition of indigenous oral storytelling, Sidney conversively crafts
both her life history and mythic tribal stories with complexly interwoven threads that articulate intricate stories of great suffering because
of, and remarkable survival despite, the colonization of the Yukon. In
the introductory discussion that precedes Sidney’s section of the book,
Cruikshank notes that Sidney repeatedly emphasized that the stories
needed to be pondered and considered deeply. Sidney relates that, as
a child, she learned the importance of thinking about stories in order
to discover their meanings (Life Lived 31). Cruikshank was forced to
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consider this in her own engagements with Sidney’s stories: “Whenever
I ask her what it is that children actually learn from these stories, she
replies by repeating the story for me. The messages, she suggests, are
implicit, self-evident; the text, she would argue, should speak for itself”
(ibid. 32). Sidney simply repeats the story. With each retelling, there
would be some slight variations, perhaps simply some alterations in
tonal emphasis or special pauses in which the storyteller might intend
her listener to hear the emphatic voice shifts as a means of making
those connective links even easier to traverse and, thereby, to understand (Contemporary American, Brill de Ramírez 129, 222).
A conversive listening-reading approach to Sidney’s stories involves
the reader in the considered interweaving of those diverse stories whose
episodic and associational meaningfulness becomes apparent once they
are understood in close juxtaposition as facets of the larger unfolding
story. By breaking up the constructed life-history narratives in the text
and interrelating the traditional mythic stories with the women’s own
lived stories, we can see how each story comes to enrich and illuminate
the others in strikingly meaningful ways. In this manner, rich symbolic
and metaphoric allusions in the life-history stories emerge, along with
historical facticity in the traditional stories. As folklorist John Miles
Foley clarifies, “As we study the oral record more thoroughly, we
learn that the oral tradition is often more accurate historically than
the written record.” And, as this essay elucidates, mythic stories, too,
can shed historical light. For example, the first traditional story in the
childhood section of Sidney’s stories, “How People Got Flint,” centers
upon themes of imperialist disempowerment that lead to potentially
genocidal effects, with the especially tragic deaths of little children:
“My kids all froze up on me”; desires for retributive justice: “Let
them die like a stone”; the importance of close family relations: “Oh,
Grandpa, . . . I guess you’re right”; the importance of people helping
each other out: “Go all over the world. People need you”; struggles to
survive hardships in this world: “People were having a hard time”; and
the realities of death and life after death: “when people are dead, they
come back like this” (Life Lived 73–74).
In “How People Got Flint,” Bear is the only person who has flint
to make fires for warmth. Because of Bear’s appropriation of the flint,
everyone else is struggling to survive the cold. Mouse tricks Bear and
steals the flint, but since Mouse is little and could be caught by Bear,
Mouse throws the flint to the other animals. Fox takes the flint and
runs away, throwing it on some rocks where it breaks into smaller
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pieces. Then Fox throws the flint all over the world so that everyone will have it. Although this seems like an end to the story, Sidney
chooses to continue the story, relating that Fox then takes some dry
rhubarb and pushes it into a lake. When the rhubarb floats back up to
the surface, Fox says, “I wish that when people are dead, they come
back like this”—depicting a desire for earthly reincarnation. Bear, who
is still upset with everyone for stealing “his” flint, responds in a contrary manner: he throws a rock in the lake which sinks, saying, “I wish
that when people die they would be like that. Let them die like a stone”
(74). Bear’s anger is emphasized by additional line spacing on the page
after this statement, indicating Sidney’s emphatic pause after Bear’s
comment. After this line spacing, the storyteller says, “He was mad,”
followed by another emphatic pause to really stress Bear’s response.
Sidney then ends the story with the framing device of a grandfather
relating the story to his grandchild.
A close conversive listening-reading of Sidney’s story “How People
Got Flint” conveys a number of teaching messages and meanings available to the listener-reader. These messages and meanings are accessible via different conversive cues throughout the story that work to
get the listener-reader’s attention and to alert her or him to elements
indicative of deep meaning. Obvious elements of the story that would
be immediately recognizable to readers unfamiliar with traditional
storytelling strategies are the attribution of personhood and intentionality to animals and the interconnections and interdependencies
between different animals and humans. Silko explains, “The remains
of things—animals and plants, the clay and the stones—were treated
with respect. Because for the ancient people all these things had spirit
and being” (“Landscape” 83). As James R. Holmes comments about
our determinations regarding the status of personhood, “Up to the
present time, we have recognized as persons only those individuals
who have the embodiment of homo sapiens, namely human beings.
There is, however, nothing about the concept of a person that requires
persons to be human beings” (30). Sometimes traditional stories with
animals as the main characters do actually tell us about those specific
types of animals, but often such personifications of animals serve as a
strategy that enables the telling of stories in ways that avoid the specificity of particular individuals or groups of human persons. Most readers would be familiar with this strategy in its various contemporary
manifestations in comic strips and cartoons.
Interestingly, Sidney’s story about flint, a bear, a fox, and other
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animals is entitled “How People Got Flint,” which leads the reader
to initially assume that the term “people” refers to human persons.
Sidney begins her story by relating that only Bear had flint and that
“people were having a hard time—sometimes fire would go out, you
know” (73). In this one statement, Sidney includes longer emphatic
pauses (marked by the text’s punctuation of a dash or period) for her
listener-readers’ reflection upon those hard times, further indicated by
the direct address of the second-person voice shift. To ensure that her
listeners and listener-readers do not limit their interpretations of the
story to the surface levels of textual information and literal meanings,
Sidney’s craft frustrates any potential simplistic understandings of her
stories. Immediately after telling us how hard a time the people were
having, she complicates our ideas about the people’s hard times without fire by both broadening and deepening the very concept of what
constitutes people or persons in the world. She does this by adding
more information about those “people” who were really struggling:
“Mice are the ones that really got it” (e.g., had a hard time [73]). Here
Sidney personifies mice as some of the little people (small, diminutive,
those with little power) who were having such a hard time. Sidney also
uses two other conversive strategies to emphasize the personhood of
animals: referencing them with names (Bear, Mouse, Fox) as proper
nouns and depicting them behaving in ways similar to humans, such as
having Mouse and Fox throw the flint to keep it away from the much
bigger and more powerful Bear.
At this point, one might still be tempted to bracket out the complex
identification of animals as persons and simply trivialize the story as
an animal story with little or no direct relevance to human persons in
the world. However, Sidney includes three additional elements to her
story that prevent this. The first is her explanation of the importance
of flint to help with keeping fires lit. This reference at the very beginning of her story clearly delineates and emphasizes the importance of
flint as something directly relevant to human persons. She also ends
her story with a referent that emphasizes the importance of this story
for human persons. By both beginning and ending the story with
human referents, Sidney makes it completely clear that this story is
far more than a simplistic animal story. In her concluding frame to
the story, the story’s relevance for human persons is made manifest
in the fact that the story is presented as being told by a grandfather
to his grandchild. While the animal characters make the story that
much more accessible to children and also clarify the story’s fictional,
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ahistorical, and mythical nature, the specific references to actual realities in the world (the widespread presence of flint, the importance of
flint for people’s fires, and the nature of human death) directly emphasize the deeper significances for human persons. The final events of the
story with the rhubarb stalk and rock in the lake and the grandfather’s
concluding comments to his grandchild further underscore the relevance of the story specifically for human persons. In these events, we
learn about human mortality and life after death.
The story additionally teaches the importance of interpersonal
cooperation (with Mouse and Fox providing flint for everyone) and
not being selfish and mean (as is Bear who wants to keep the flint just
for himself, even though as a bear with lots of fur, he did not even need
the flint in the first place). However, the coded nature of traditional
storytelling is such that even these more literal and simpler aspects of
the story can be understood in much more complex and meaningful
ways for adults. As Joan N. Radner and Susan S. Lanser point out,
“Coding occurs in the context of complex audiences, in situations
where some of the audience may be competent to decode the message,
but others—including those who might be dangerous—are not. Thus a
coded text is by definition complex, and its messages may be ambiguous” (414). In fact, James Clifford states that this is also the very
process of ethnography, which “is actively situated between powerful
systems of meaning. . . . Ethnography decodes and recodes” (“Partial
Truths” 2, emphasis in original). Presumably, with any ethnographic
work we have multiple levels of encoding and decoding at work for the
reader and listener-reader to decipher.
The associational and episodic structuring of traditional storytelling
provides many of the additional connective links necessary to understand the deeper meaningfulness of the stories. For example, when
the trickster Crow stories are told juxtaposed “in a series” of stories,
Cruikshank notes that “different people tell different episodes in different order” (qtd. in Sidney, Tagish Tlaagú 90). Insofar as Sidney’s story
“How People Got Flint” is concerned, the linking of the three stories
(the theft of the flint, the submersion of the rhubarb stalk and rock
in the lake, and the actual storytelling event with the concluding conversation between the grandfather and grandchild) both complicates
the stories and simplifies them in that very conjunctive process. While
Bear’s selfishness is obvious, additionally significant to the story is
Bear’s thick coat of winter fur and the fact that he had no need for the
flint at all. This is especially underscored in Sidney’s statement about
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where Bear kept the flint: “They say Bear tied it under his tail where
he had long hair under there” (74). Within this one sentence, Sidney
emphasizes the mythic and ancient power and importance of the story
(“They say . . .”), points out Bear’s possession of an entirely unnecessary object (“he had long hair”), and communicates Bear’s selfishness
in a particularly graphic, scatological, and comic way (“Bear tied it
under his tail”).
By immediately following her evocations of hard times with the
comic description of Bear and his prized possession, Sidney balances
out the seriousness with lightheartedness, the sadness with humor,
and past times (people struggling without fire) with imagined events
(Mouse stealing flint from under Bear’s tail). Peggy Beck and Anna Lee
Walters (Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria) explain that such humor, especially
depicted by clowns, “helps contrast imbalance and balance, order and
disorder, in such a way that even a child can understand the basic
concept of balance” (309). In the comic behavior of Mouse reaching
under Bear’s tail to chew off the flint, we can only imagine the storyteller acting out that event as Mouse lifts up Bear’s tail, wrinkles his
nose, makes a terrible face (as everyone laughs, imagining the smell),
and then completes his onerous task.
Relational and Episodic Interconnections
This particular story is the first one that Cruikshank places, with
Sidney’s approval, after the prose narrative section “Childhood.” Sidney agreed to the edited organization of the text with its episodic
structuring created through the juxtaposition of the more traditional
stories with the chronologically ordered personal stories. This episodic
arrangement is also true of the other stories in Life Lived Like a Story.
Indeed, the vast majority of Native stories produced by various contemporary and past ethnographers, and most contemporary literatures
by Native writers, regardless of gender, are told within the episodic and
associational formats of their respective tribal and familial oral storytelling traditions, in which the stories are interwoven with each other
in a range of meaningful and deepening ways. Stories have their own
range and depth of meanings accessible to the listener or listener-reader
at different levels of understanding and from various perspectives.
The meanings are not textually bound, but rather they arise through
the interrelationships that develop between the storyteller, her (or his)
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listeners, and the story. As I explain elsewhere, “This conjunction
of diverse worlds and events (lived and imagined, past and present,
historic and mythic) reflects the relational focus of storytelling, where
the connections made between realities and domains are emphasized,
and a more textual discursive privileging of separate events and subjectivities is deemphasized, if not altogether absent” (139). Part of the
listener’s and storyteller’s conversive responsibilities include making
and recognizing the interconnections between and among different
stories—including the stories that the storyteller relates, other stories
that the listener has been told and remembers, stories that the listener
has actually lived, and the immediate story of the storytelling event.
These interconnections can be seen in the important interrelationships
among the traditional stories that Sidney chooses to relate in conjunction with stories from her life.
In “How People Got Flint,” very serious issues of life and death,
human mortality and human spirituality, greed and selfishness, and
generosity and caring are presented in the stories about Bear, Mouse,
Fox, Grandpa, and his grandchild. Similarly, in her selection of stories that reflect back on her childhood, Sidney expressly relates these
personal stories in ways that touch on the deeper issues of human
existence in the world, including the real-world effects from the Eurocanadian colonization of the Yukon region. The other traditional stories in the “Stories from Childhood” section also center upon these
themes, including human mortality and death (in a story about two
old ladies who help care for the world), and lessons for children and
parents in respecting each other (as in the little boy who criticizes
his food or the mother who gives her son moldy fish to eat). The lessons in these stories provide the needed framework against which to
approach Sidney’s own life stories. This is especially evident in the
stories she chooses to include about her childhood—stories that also
revolve around the themes of life, death, language, and naming, and
what it is that peoples hold sacred.
The section entitled “Childhood” begins with Sidney’s birth and
naming, and then turns to stories about her siblings (especially her
beloved sister Dora who died as a young girl), tales of boarding school
experiences, and other stories from those years that struck Sidney as
sufficiently relevant to retell, including a traditional old lady story.
It is also significant to note that, in choosing stories to share with
her non-Native ethnographer and for a larger readership of Native
and non-Native Yukoners and others (as Cruikshank has explained,
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“Her conscious audience was always for folks in the Yukon” [June
24, 2000, letter]), it is telling that many of Sidney’s stories especially
emphasize the colonialist relationships that developed with the arrival
of Euroamericans and Eurocanadians in the Yukon and the inevitable
consequences for the First Nations people who lived there. Instead of
focusing on specific events that involved only her family and other
Native peoples, Sidney selects stories that are more demographically
inclusive, even if that inclusivity, at times, unveils the realities of a
racial colonization whose effects endure into today. Perhaps these stories exemplify her acute awareness of her broader audience and her
interest in educating diverse Yukoners (and others) about the truths of
her times.
The Sacred Significance of Naming
Amid the Disjunctive Discourse of Colonization
The very first story that Sidney shares about her early years centers
on the presence of a white prospector mining near her family’s home.
Shortly after her birth in January of 1902, the prospector George
Dale came to her father’s house to escape the winter cold. When he
was shown the little baby, Sidney relates that he said, “Oh, that baby
looks so sweet. Just like a little angel. . . . Call her Angela” (Life Lived
66). This one story conveys volumes about the colonizing interactions between white and Native Canadians. In Sidney’s version of this
story, George Dale, who had only just met her father, tells him what
his daughter’s name should be, with apparently no consideration that
the child might already have a name, either in the Indian way or the
white way or both. Years later, when Sidney’s husband meets George
Dale by chance, Dale informs him that he is Sidney’s godfather. The
cultural divide is evident in the divergent ways that those involved see
this history. After twenty years have passed, Dale recognizes Sidney’s
maiden name and claims her as his godchild. In contrast, when her
husband returns home and asserts that he has met her godfather, Sidney denies any knowledge of such a relationship. When she asks her
mother about it, her mother tells her that when she was baptized,
there was a “white man” present, presumably George Dale: “Somebody took you off my arm and held you. So it must have been George
Dale. White man, anyway.” Whereas George Dale remembered his
role in being named Sidney’s godfather, Sidney had never even been
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told about his presence, and her mother has no recollection of George
Dale other than that there was some white man present. Concluding
her story about George Dale, Sidney ends by reiterating, “So he’s the
one that gave me this name, Angela” (67). In Sidney’s case, her first
name, Angela, connects us back to the days of the Klondike gold rush
and its cataclysmic effects on the aboriginal peoples of that region. For
Sidney, the discursive impact came early with a name “given” to her in
infancy by a “white man” prospector. The enduring empowerment of
conversive relationship within her close tribal community subsequently
transformed that name into the referent by which she was known to
those close to her: Auntie Angela.
This story gives us information about the origin of Sidney’s English
name “Angela”; nevertheless, the specific factual information or details
in stories is merely that—the superficial facticity of story texts. Stories
(unlike texts) go far beyond the surface level of their narrative texts.
The details in stories are there to provide the added keys that help our
entries into and understandings of the stories’ meanings. Cruikshank
explains, “Meaning does not inhere in events but involves weaving
those events into stories that are meaningful at the time” (Social Life
2). Readers of orally informed stories need to be careful not to let the
significance of the details overshadow the larger import of the overall story to which those facts are in service. If Sidney only wanted us
to learn the origin of her first name, there would have been no need
for her to relate that fact within the scope of a larger storytelling. She
could have merely said, “A white prospector in the area saw me when
I was a baby, and he gave me the name ‘Angela.’” However, Sidney
chooses to relate this one event as a story. What remains for Sidney’s
listener-reader is to read through the narrative text and begin to listen
to the story that will emerge through the listener-reader’s engagement
with Sidney’s words, intonations, and silences. In this fashion, the story
of her name opens up into a far deeper story about the power of language, the importance of a person’s name, and the intrusive and lasting
effects of outsiders upon Sidney’s family and world, and the efforts of
Canadian First Nations people to transform the disempowering effects
of that colonization, as best they could, into personal, familial, tribal,
and community strengths.
In Sidney’s story, the white prospector comes to Sidney’s family
home for food and shelter on a cold winter night. Sidney emphasizes
that it was a really cold night: “It was a cold, cold night, he said” (Life
Lived 66, emphasis in original). Perhaps this emphasis is to explain
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the miner’s visit to the Indian family, a visit the white man might not
have made unless absolutely necessary. Whether his visit is explained
only in terms of his need for warmth, his presence in Tagish John’s
(Sidney’s father’s) home is a presence that would not have been as readily reciprocated. It is unlikely that the Native peoples of Canada during
the early part of the twentieth century (or even today, for that matter)
would have been as welcomed into the homes of the white Eurocanadians as Mrs. Sidney’s family and many other Native peoples have welcomed non-Native people into their homes. The tenuous relationship
between George Dale and Tagish John’s family is further underscored
by Dale’s total absence from the world of the family since his visit,
with the apparently lone exception of his presence at Sidney’s baptism
when, as her mother recollects, a white man held the baby (67).
In Sidney’s recounting, Dale goes to Tagish John’s home assuming he will be welcomed and receive shelter from the cold. There he
is shown their new baby. As a visitor accepting the family’s gift of
hearth, within a conversive relational framework, his acceptance of
the family’s gift would be considered a sign of his friendship. That
Tagish John considers it such is evident in his desire to show the white
miner the new baby—thereby bringing Dale further into the world
of the family. Dale compliments the baby and then has the audacity to tell Tagish John what name he should give the baby and that
he (Dale) should be her godfather “because I’m the first person she
saw” (66). Presumably, Dale meant that he was the first white person,
since clearly there were other persons in the home. Within a conversively aboriginal worldview, Tagish John’s gifts to George Dale (shelter, acceptance of the baby’s name, and the baptismal godfather role)
would have been symbols concretizing their friendship. Furthermore,
the ceremonial importance given to naming and the fact that Tagish
John accepts Dale’s wish and names his daughter Angela clearly show
Tagish John’s appreciation of Dale’s “friendship” and his perception of
their relationship as far more than a passing acquaintance. However,
it appears that Dale neither understood this nor took his role in the
baby’s life seriously since Sidney had no memory of ever meeting him
or even of having been told about him. Dale’s connection to Sidney is
largely discursive. For him, the words, the surface facts of the story,
the text are what matter. Yet for Tagish John’s family, Dale’s lack of a
lived and enduring reciprocity regarding the friendship makes him and
the friendship unsubstantial and therefore unremembered. For them,
the names, the words, the text must be grounded in reality with the
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sort of relational connections in the world that make Dale’s presence
substantial to the family.
Sidney’s story of her naming tells us about the colonialist prerogatives of the white settler community and the presumptions and behaviors that had real-world effects on the First Nations peoples in Canada.
In contrast to Dale’s view of naming in which a white man with a marginal connection to a Native child can decide the child’s name, Sidney
explains how sacred names are in her culture: “You’ve got to give kids
a name as soon as they’re born. Otherwise they get lost—their spirit
gets lost—that’s what they claim. I’ve got two names: Stóow for my
grandmother—my mother’s stepmother—and Ch’óonehte’ Má” (Life
Lived 67). Names given to children were traditionally names of other
relatives within the same clan, emphasizing the connective links that
helped to keep the community together: “The nations [clans] own the
names. Indians don’t allow different people to use their names” (Haa
Shagóon xx). Sidney’s comments about the weight given to naming
within her culture contrast sharply with the presumptuous and colonial attitudes of a white man who tells an aboriginal couple what name
they should give their daughter even though his relationship to the
baby being named is marginal. The weight of this one story is further
deepened by three subsequent stories that relate (1) the upheaval of
the indigenous Yukon a century ago, such that Sidney never received
the coming-of-age naming ceremony that was traditional for girls (a
loss she felt deeply); (2) the deaths of her parents’ first three children
(which occurred a few years prior to Sidney’s birth) from the diseases
that the prospectors and other outsiders brought into the Yukon; and
(3) the death of a beloved younger sister who dies in a missionary-run
residential school and whose name is given to the next daughter who
is born.
In the seemingly simple life-history narrative of Sidney’s name,
she communicates an intricately interwoven story that demonstrates
her people’s commitment to an applied spirituality that goes beyond
the mere sentiment of Dale’s claim of being her “godfather.” The
power of stories lies in their unifying effects as they bring persons
together in community and individuals together in their integrating
relationships with all of creation. In the colonizing disruptions of the
Yukon, traditional sacred stories went untold and ceremonies omitted, perhaps even forgotten (as in the failure to have an aboriginal
naming ceremony for Angela Sidney as a girl). Traditionally among
First Nations peoples, gifts received and given were understood as
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symbolic of developing relationships among people, and those gifts
and relationships were to be honored with effort in continuance. As
Sidney explained to Cruikshank, prior to the colonizing Euroamerican
and Eurocanadian presence in the Yukon, even those relationships that
were initiated during the early years of the fur trade were taken very
seriously among the aboriginal men of various tribal groups: “In the
trade in furs which took place in the last [the nineteenth] century, firm
and lasting partnerships were established between coastal and interior
men” (Tagish Tlaagú 99). Sidney emphasizes that the movements of
peoples and families divided up communities while also creating new
relational interweavings. In sharing the stories of her people’s moves
and removes, she relates a meeting she had with people on the Alaskan
coast. When she mentioned that she was from the interior, the coastal
man replied, “Oh, my . . . My great-grandmother told me, ‘Two women
went that way, inland. Two or three. They got married inland!’ Now
I’m glad to meet you” (Life Lived 39). Through their sharing of mutual
oral history stories, they confirmed for each other the historical fact
of their interwoven stories, histories, and tribal and familial relations.
As Sidney concludes, “I know now the truth that coast people are our
relations”—with all the weight that the aboriginal concept of “relations” conveys (ibid.).
Storied Life Lessons
A conversive storytelling approach to Angela Sidney’s stories is crucial
to enable the reader to move beyond a more surface interpretive lens
that would artificially divorce traditional mythic stories from personal
life-history narratives, relegating each, respectively, to what would otherwise be perceived as the separate realms of the fictionally archetypal
and the factually historical. Conversive engagements discover Sidney’s
life-history stories to be factually true yet also symbolic and rich in
meaning. Concomitantly, the traditional and mythic stories, while
offering spiritual and moral lessons, also turn out to be historically,
tribally, and personally significant. Relational and episodic meaning
is evident throughout her stories. Sidney’s story about her first name
relates actual historical information, and the story of Bear, Fox, and
the Mouse people retells a traditional mythic story from her tribe; yet,
when read together in a conversive manner, it becomes clear that the
two stories are very much the same story of power differentials, coloni-
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263
zation and its consequences, disjunctive intercultural communications,
aboriginal people’s struggles to survive, beliefs in life after death, and
the moral, relational courage by which the people were taught to live.
Isolated from their tribal and historical contexts, the traditional
stories lose their actual relevance to persons’ lives in the world (e.g.,
those of their readers) and, thereby, take on the objectified and textualized forms of storied and mythic artifacts—interesting as evidence
of an earlier and exotic “other” world and time, relevant as historical
artifacts of interest to Sidney’s descendants and fellow tribal members,
but not immediately relevant to the lives of those of us distanced
from their originating worlds by time, geography, and culture. Analogously, readings of Sidney’s life-history stories, separated from their
traditional storytelling frames, deprive the personal stories of their
deeper, time immemorial meanings and their larger tribal and regional
histories. As Cruikshank relates, “Gradually I learned how narratives
about complex relationships between animals and humans, between
young women and stars, between young men and animal helpers could
frame not just larger, cosmological issues but also the social practices
of women engaged with a rapidly globalizing world” (Social Life 46).
The disjuncture of the mythic and sacred teaching stories from the
everyday and historical events of Sidney’s life attenuates all of the
stories into mere traces of interpretive concept; what is needed is the
everyday grounding and mythic deepening that together provide the
meaningful anchors for both the traditional and life-history stories.
Angela Sidney’s lifetime traversed cataclysmic changes in the lives
of her family and fellow tribal members, and yet in her conversive
storytelling, Sidney communicates much about the potential postcolonial “survivance” of First Nations people beyond their historical
condition of Eurocanadian colonization (Vizenor 169). For Sidney,
such personal and familial survivance is framed in spiritual terms that
acknowledge and build on the past while focusing on the future of a
changing world. As Cruikshank emphasizes, “A recurring theme in
Mrs. Sidney’s account is her preoccupation with evaluating and balancing old customs with new ideas” such that in her eighties (and in
the 1980s), she sought “to reconcile orthodox [aboriginal] spiritual
beliefs with a potpourri of religious ideas [Christian and Bahá’í] introduced to the Yukon during her lifetime” (Life Lived 23). By interweaving diverse manifestations of the sacred, Sidney brings them together
within the rubric of one larger, world-embracing story. In his essay
“The Politics of Knowledge,” Edward Said makes a poignant call for
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just the sort of “worldliness” that Sidney achieves and demonstrates in
her storytelling. As Said explains, “What I am talking about therefore
is the opposite of separatism, and also the reverse of exclusivism” (28).
Sidney does just this, what Vine Deloria (Lakota) advocates in his call
for Native peoples to “be prepared to confront religion and religious
activities in new and novel ways” (65).
Through her storytelling skill, Sidney is able to relate the history of
her life and times with all the force and effect made possible in story.
Readers who work to read beyond the text to access the symbolically
rich stories will find a multiplicity of conversively informed meanings
that are the true reward of conversive listening-reading.6 The range of
stories in Life Lived Like a Story communicate far more than can even
begin to be explicated in one essay, and ideally each reader as a listenerreader needs to plumb these stories’ interwoven depths for herself or
himself. So doing, Sidney’s and the other women’s stories will become
especially meaningful to each listener-reader as the stories come to life
beyond the bounds of textual fixity and into a newly resurrected storytelling with each co-creative, conversive listening-reading response.
Without the day-to-day experiences of coming to know people and
their worlds by actually living in those worlds, such relational engagements across time and place can be achieved in powerfully real and
meaningful ways through story. Globally, people have been articulating the truths of their worlds since the beginning of human existence.
Ignorance of the world’s diversity (spiritual and otherwise) is far less
due to peoples’ silence and more due to the absence of listening ears
and seeing eyes; textual distance and objectification disengage and
disincline readers from a co-creative, close, and empathic listening to
others’ stories. Sidney and Cruikshank provide a strong corrective to
those “stories [that] are at the heart of what explorers and novelists
say about strange regions of the world,” for, as Said reminds us, stories “also become the method colonized people use to assert their own
identity and the existence of their own history” (Culture xii).
The past several decades of feminist, cultural, postcolonial, and
other postmodern criticisms have drawn our attention to the many
stories of diverse humankind. Our responsibilities now remain to learn
how to listen to stories conversively by means of those pathways that
enable us to enter and become active coparticipants in the transforming, empowering, and healing stories of the world. This is why people have told stories from the beginning of time until today. In this
wise woman’s tales, we will be able to hear Sidney’s diverse stories of
Chapter 10: Surviving the Colonialist Legacy
265
the sacred that permitted a traditional indigenous elder in the Yukon
to express ancient sacred, tribal beliefs that affirmed her indigenous
ancestry, her deeply lived connections to the sacred, and her commitment to a vision of global community. Notwithstanding a lifetime of
unimaginable loss, turmoil, and suffering at the hands of the colonial
powers of church and state, Sidney maintained a firm grasp of the crucial role that storytelling has played and continues to play in the health,
integrity, and balance in people’s lives. Her gift to us is her storytelling;
our responsibilities are to receive her gifts with attuned conversive ears.
“‘Well,’ she concluded one afternoon, ‘I have no money to leave to my
grandchildren. My stories are my wealth’” (Life Lived 36). As Sidney
says, “Well, I’ve tried to live my life right, just like a story” (ibid. 20).
Notes
1. Far more serious is the extent to which Christian missionary work in Indian country has overtly been part of colonizing ideologies and agendas. George
Tinker writes that “Christian missionaries . . . were partners in genocide,” noting
their “complicity in the destruction of Indian cultures and tribal social structures—complicity in the devastating impoverishment and death of the people to
whom they preached” (4). Jace Weaver makes even more explicit the culpability of missionaries in the destruction of tribal cultures: “Missionaries, in their
colonialist drive to assimilate Natives, told those they converted that to become
Christian meant to stop being Indian” (Religious Identity 5; also Other Words
285). The colonialist devaluation of indigenous sacred practices, on behalf of
both church and state, forced many tribes to take their tribal ceremonies underground for extended periods of time until those practices, discouraged or
outlawed, were openly permitted by their colonizing governments. Maintaining
the integrity and freedom of tribal sacred practice has been an ongoing struggle
throughout the past and continuing colonization of Native peoples by the various European, Euroamerican, and Eurocanadian nations. This being said, it
must be noted that the various European nations colonizing North America were
not uniformly disparaging of indigenous culture. Included in Michael Oleska’s
Alaskan Missionary Spirituality is an early Russian letter from Orthodox bishop
Petr that recognizes parallels between the traditional stories of the Alaskan Natives and many stories in the Bible. Perhaps even more significant in his 1894
letter is his affirmation of the divine origins of traditional indigenous belief: “It
must be noted in accordance with God’s Holy Revelations the Aleuts and the
Kadiaks [sic] were not completely bereft of God’s Grace, as a result of which
there remained with them a sense of morality which prevented them from falling
into ultimate sin” (71). This level of respect for indigenous spirituality represents
one of the few exceptions among the majority of Christian missionization efforts
toward Native populations where the embrace of Christianity invariably was
intertwined with a devaluation of tribal culture.
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2.Elaine J. Lawless advocates a changing “role of the ethnographer in the
wave of thinking about a ‘new ethnography’” to the extent of rejecting “the notion of scholar voice as privileged voice, the scholar’s position as more legitimate
because it is the more educated or more credible one” (302, 312). Recently, some
anthropologists have begun to take conversive approaches in their own work,
providing new models of relational, collaborative, and intersubjective fieldwork—what Judith Okely has described as “lived interactions, participatory experience and embodied knowledge” (“Participatory Experience” 3). The process
of transforming stories into constructed texts varies from text to text, editor to
editor, and storyteller to storyteller. As James Clifford writes, “Whether brought
by missionary, trader, or ethnographer, writing is both empowering (a necessary, effective way of storing and manipulating knowledge) and corrupting (a
loss of immediacy, of the face-to-face communication Socrates cherished, of the
presence and intimacy of speech)” (“On Ethnographic Allegory” 118). Paul de
Man explains such a contradiction in relation to autobiographical works: “any
book with a readable title-page is, to some extent, autobiographical. But just as
we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the
same token, none of them is or can be” (922). In relation to ethnographically
informed Native American autobiographies, we can either read the ethnographic
text as a discursively constructed text that yields information and fact about the
“informant’s” life and times, or we can become conversive listener-readers working to listen to the underlying stories that offer a deeper realm of meaning and
symbolism.
3.In this collection, Cruikshank works co-creatively with the three Native women elders, enabling them to speak their highly skilled storytelling craft
through the mediative layers of the text. Although this volume is technically a
work of ethnographic collaboration, it is also a collection of the Native women’s
creative storytelling that combines tribal myth and belief system, colonial history
and its consequents, and the women’s own craft. As such, this volume contrasts
from “much of the early construction of published American Indian autobiographies [that] went through a linguistically and ideologically interpretive process
that transformed conversive tellings into discursive texts that, more often than
not, diverge substantially from their storied beginnings and instead present the
ideologies, language, and discursive forms of the colonizing power of the academy” (Brill de Ramírez, Native American Life-History Narratives x).
4. From without, we can point to the various semiotic significances displayed in the textual narratives; also from an outside, albeit relational, reader-response approach, the reader can bring the world of the text into his or her interpretive life; a dialogic reading enables reader access to the (often op)positionally
presented voices in an apparently heteroglossic and logocentric text; and hermeneutics illuminates the various meanings of the text as understood through the
reader’s own orientation to that text (Brill de Ramírez 6–7, 129–54).
5.Revisionist scholars, like Judith Okely and Johannes Fabian, have argued
rightly against the imperialism and objectification inherent in anthropological
fieldwork. Fabian asserts, “field research is fundamentally confrontational and
only superficially observational. To acknowledge that Self and Other are inextricably involved in a dialectical process will make anthropology not less but more
realistic” (20). In the same vein, Okely writes, “The field worker, as opposed to
Chapter 10: Surviving the Colonialist Legacy
267
those who analyse other peoples’ material, has a peculiarly individualistic and
personal confrontation with ‘living’ data” (“Self” 171). As long as the fieldwork
orientation follows a discursively constructed format, the communications process will be varyingly dialectical and dialogic with the inherent (op)positional
stances present among all involved. However, a conversively informed set of
relationships that are established among the fieldworker and all others involved
definitionally avoids the confrontational situation that Okely and Fabian warn
us about. Julie Cruikshank’s work with three Native women elders in the Yukon
stands out as a model for such work. Cruikshank was devoted to ensuring the
primacy of the women’s voices and stories while at the same time providing sufficient additional background information to enable non-Native and non-Yukon
readers access into and understanding of the women’s stories.
6.As Stephen A. Tyler explains regarding the diverse communication patterns manifested by orally told stories and their textualized versions, “Orality
makes us think of many voices telling many tales in many tongues, in contrast to
the inherent monologism of texts that only tell different versions of the one true
tale” (136). Further, Clifford emphasizes that “experiential, interpretive, dialogical, and polyphonic processes are at work, discordantly, in any ethnography”
(“On Ethnographic Authority” 142).
Works Cited
Beck, Peggy V., Anna Lee Walters, and Nia Francisco. The Sacred: Ways of
Knowledge, Sources of Life. Tsaile, AZ: Navajo Community College P,
1992.
Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry. Contemporary American Indian Literatures and
the Oral Tradition. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1999.
———. Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial and Postcolonial
Navajo Ethnography. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2007.
Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics
and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 98–
120. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
———. “On Ethnographic Authority.” Representations 1, no. 2 (Spring 1983):
118–46.
———. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–27. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.
Cruikshank, Julie, in collaboration with Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith, and Annie
Ned. Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders.
Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1990.
———. Personal letter to Susan B. Brill de Ramírez. June 24, 2000.
———. The Social Life of Stories. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1996.
Deloria, Vine, Jr. God Is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, CO: Fulcrum,
1994.
de Man, Paul. “Autobiography as De-facement.” Modern Language Notes 94
(1979): 919–30.
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Dwyer, Kevin. “Case Study: On the Dialogic of Field Work.” Dialectical Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1977): 143–51.
Fabian, Johannes. “Culture, Time, and the Object of Anthropology.” Berkshire
Review 20 (1985): 7–23.
Foley, John Miles. Videoconference lecture. Bradley University, Peoria, IL. November 3, 1998.
Holmes, James R. “The Status of Persons or Who Was That Masked Metaphor?” Advances in Descriptive Psychology 6 (1991): 15–35.
Howe, Susan. My Emily Dickinson. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic, 1985.
Lawless, Elaine J. “‘I was afraid someone like you . . . an outsider . . . would misunderstand’: Negotiating Interpretive Differences Between Ethnographers
and Subjects.” Journal of American Folklore 105, no. 417 (Summer 1992):
302–14.
Okely, Judith. “Anthropology and Autobiography: Participatory Experience and
Embodied Knowledge.” In Okely and Callaway, 1–28.
———. “The Self and Scientism.” Journal of the Anthropological Society of
Oxford 6, no. 3 (1975): 171–88.
Okely, Judith, and Helen Callaway. Anthropology and Autobiography. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Oleska, Michael, ed. Alaskan Missionary Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1987.
Radner, Joan N., and Susan S. Lanser. “The Feminist Voice: Strategies of Coding in Folklore and Literature.” Journal of American Folklore 100, no. 398
(1987): 412–25.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
———. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Raritan 1 (Summer 1991): 18–31.
Sidney, Angela. Haa Shagóon: Our Family History. Comp. Julie Cruikshank.
Whitehorse: Yukon Native Languages Project (Council for Yukon Indians
and the Government of Yukon), 1983.
———. Place Names of the Tagish Region, Southern Yukon. Whitehorse: Yukon
Native Languages Project/Council for Yukon Indians, 1980.
———. Tagish Tlaagú: Tagish Stories. Recorded by Julie Cruikshank. Whitehorse: Council for Yukon Indians and the Government of Yukon, 1982.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.
———. “Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination.” In On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History, ed. Daniel Halpern, 83–94. San Francisco: North Point, 1987.
———. “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” In English
Literature: Opening Up the Canon, ed. Leslie A. Fiedler and Houston A.
Baker, Jr., 54–72. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981.
Stanton, Domna C. “Autogynography: Is the Subject Different?” In The Female
Autograph: Theory and Practice of Autobiography from the Tenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Domna C. Stanton, 3–20. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
Tinker, George. Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993.
Treat, James, ed. Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity
in the United States and Canada. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Trinh T. Minh-ha. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.
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Tyler, Stephen A. “On Being Out of Words.” Cultural Anthropology 1 (1986):
131–38.
Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.
Weaver, Jace, ed. Native American Religious Identity: Unforgotten Gods. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998.
———. Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture. Norman:
U of Oklahoma P, 2001.
———. That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native
American Community. New York: Oxford UP, 1997.
Wong, Hertha D. Sweet. “First-Person Plural: Subjectivity and Community in
Native American Women’s Autobiography.” In Women, Autobiography,
Theory: A Reader, ed. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, 168–78. Madison: U
of Wisconsin P, 1998.
C hapter 11
“Soul Murder” and Rebirth
Trauma, Narrative, and Imagination
in Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night
J eanie E. W arnock
Cereus Blooms at Night, by Caribbean Canadian novelist Shani
Mootoo, begins with a grim picture of its central female figure, the
elderly Mala Ramchandin. Drugged and bound to a stretcher, the terrified woman is carried into an institution for the aged and left to face
prosecution for the murder of her father. After years of suffering incestuous childhood abuse, followed by the ostracism of her community,
she has spent the greater part of her life locked within the confines of
her own mind, repeatedly reliving the traumatic moments of her mother’s abandonment and her father’s violent sexual assault. As the novel
opens, her life seems about to conclude as it had been lived, in one more
repetition of an unremitting cycle of paralysis, madness, and pain.
Since its publication ten years ago, Mootoo’s novel has attracted
considerable critical attention, most of it concentrating on the text’s
place within the postcolonial tradition of Caribbean writers. Focusing particular attention on the symbol of the garden, these critics
have explored the novel’s treatment of sexual and racial hybridity and
its deconstruction of the “identity categories of race, sexuality, and
nation” (Howells 151).1 While such approaches highlight an essential
aspect of Mootoo’s novel, they unwittingly elide the incestuous sexual
violation that lies at the center of the novel. To characterize the abuse
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271
euphemistically, as “an expression of the unspeakable excess of the
border-crossing that victimized Mala” (Hoving 158), or to treat it
briefly as a consequence of “the psychological legacy of colonialism”
(Howells 154), unintentionally reinforces the silence and discomfort
surrounding disclosures of incestuous abuse and reveals the extent to
which society still wishes to believe “that the universal incest taboo
is universally preserved” (Frawley-O’Dea 183).2 Herself a survivor
of childhood sexual assault, Mootoo has discussed her own silencing
by her grandmother and the release that finally putting words to her
experiences has brought her.3 Such approaches also ignore the specific
and disturbing detail with which Mootoo portrays Mala’s personal
experiencing of the incest—she attempts both to convey the singularity
of the abuse and yet to destabilize her readers through the “empathic
unsettlement” described by historian and trauma theorist Dominick
LaCapra.4 Interpreting the abuse almost wholly within the larger context of the consequences of colonialism, as Arundhati Roy argues in
The God of Small Things, “cauterizes” or discounts the pain of the
individual, perpetuating the sense that, in the face of collective historical trauma, “personal despair c[an] never be desperate enough” (20).
But as Roy’s novel indicates, it is the recognition of personal histories
of trauma, loss, and pain that counters the metanarrative of colonialism and insists that individual lives and individual suffering matter.
In her graphic depiction of Mala’s extreme physical and psychological trauma, Mootoo sets out the violation of the intimacy, trust, and
dependency that lie at the heart of interhuman relationships and challenges her readers with a series of almost irresolvable problems. Is it
possible for her protagonist, an elderly woman so paralyzed by her fear
of human interaction that she gradually loses the ability to speak, to
regain the ability to love others? If she has no cognitive distance from
her memories but is, instead, inhabited by their violence and pain, then
how is she ever to alter her response to her past: to reinterpret it creatively, rather than engage in endless reenactments? In attempting to
devise a novel that allows for the possibility of redemption and grace
while acknowledging the irrecoverable losses of the past, Mootoo also
raises difficult ethical and moral issues for both herself and her readers. How is she to construct a narrative that testifies to the continuing
presence of love and compassion in the world without trivializing the
extent of Mala’s suffering? In what ways should she, as a writer, represent Mala’s trauma, and in what ways are we, as readers, supposed to
respond?
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Literary scholars, psychoanalysts, and historians have engaged in
an extensive debate over the nature of traumatic experience, considering the ways in which survivors may attempt to recover, articulate, and
integrate their memories into a narrative, as well as the ethical and
moral dilemmas involved in such a recounting. Some contend that both
autobiographical and fictional accounts of trauma provide a valuable
means by which an individual or a group may work through traumatic
memories and incorporate them into a personal or collective narrative that restores meaning and a sense of agency.5 Others argue that
representations of trauma should recognize that such an experience
can never be truly captured in language or shared with or communicated to another.6 Attempts to master or narrate traumatic experience,
they contend, lead to an objectification of the past that trivializes the
survivor’s suffering. Different approaches have attempted to balance or
negotiate between these extremes. In particular, scholars have criticized
the glorification of trauma as an experience that challenges the bounds
of language because, they argue, such a formulation condemns the
sufferer, whether fictional or living, to a repeated reliving of the experience, often to the point of madness. The balance to be striven for, they
stress, is to contain the trauma within a narrative while continuing to
commemorate the irrecoverable losses of the past and to respect the
often incomprehensible suffering of the victims.7
While these scholars place different emphasis on the ways in which
trauma may be conceptualized, understood, and even defined, studies
of childhood sexual abuse, particularly those that adopt an approach
based on either relational psychoanalysis or object relations theory,
have tended to focus their attention on the wider interpersonal context in which the abuse occurs and to consider the interplay between
intrapsychic and interpersonal factors in understanding, articulating,
and coming to terms with the experience. Childhood incest trauma,
Gilead Nachmani argues, arises out of a failure of intersubjective
relations. Thus, rather than focusing exclusively on the inadequacy
of language in conveying an entirely unexpected and overwhelming
experience, Nachmani emphasizes: “Traumas . . . are relational processes that facilitate multiple outrageous events” (195). They occur, he
argues, because of the systematic denial of the selfhood and the voice
of the other, which then prepares the ground for the actual abuse as
well as the continued silencing of the victim, who becomes entrapped
within her or his abuser’s world and denied both an inner and an outer
space from which to challenge the violence done to her or him. The
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273
victim is silenced not only because the traumatic experience cannot be
conceptualized but also because of the familial, social, and cultural circumstances surrounding the abuse, as well as the damage done to the
individual’s sense of self. Because the incest violates the child’s closest
ties, damaging her or his faith in those upon whom she or he is dependent, it undermines the trust and love needed to establish a child’s sense
of human connectedness and the belief that her or his experiences can
be shared with others in a mutually meaningful way. In identifying
with the aggressor in order to survive, the individual also has no sense
of self free from the inner presence of her or his abuser and loses the
ability to listen to and acknowledge her or his pain.8
In his work with trauma patients, Sándor Ferenczi, a close colleague
and friend of Sigmund Freud, was one of the first psychoanalysts to
explore the interplay between intrapsychic and interpersonal factors
in recounting and coming to terms with childhood sexual trauma.9
Sometimes controversially, he stresses the importance of the loving
and nurturing support provided by the listener or analyst.10 Reflecting upon one of his patients, he underlines the contrast between her
past and present experiencing of the trauma. In the past, there was
“total isolation instead of the possibility of telling her troubles and of
being listened to sympathetically” (Clinical Diary 27). By contrast, the
therapeutic situation re-creates the past experience, but with someone
else present to help and comfort: “Being alone leads to splitting. The
presence of someone with whom one can share and communicate joy
and sorrow (love and understanding) can HEAL the trauma” (ibid.
201). The individual then, he emphasizes, is healed not so much by
gaining intellectual insight and understanding into her past, as Freud
argues, but by reliving it, in the reenactment, differently.11 There is an
inner shift in the way in which the person views herself and her world,
occasioned by the exchange between the therapist and her client.
It is this potential to reexperience the trauma of the past differently because of the love and restorative care of another, and because
of changed interpersonal relationships in the present, that Mootoo
explores in her novel Cereus Blooms at Night. Her elderly protagonist,
Mala, begins the novel disconnected from both herself and her community, stripped of her faith in the capacity of language to allow her
to communicate with herself, with others, and with the divine. Not
only is she silenced by society, which comes to blame and ridicule her
for the incest; she also loses the ability to speak to and listen to herself.
But while Mootoo sets out the ways in which her father’s incestuous
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sexual abuse has consumed the body, as well as the life and spirit, of
Mala, enacting the “soul murder” described by researcher Leonard
Shengold,12 she also recognizes the transforming capacity of love and
compassion in human relationships.
Befriended by Tyler, a nurse at the Paradise Alms House, Mala
begins a gradual journey out of the violence and pain of her past, a
journey traced in both the inner and the frame narratives of the novel.
But her history, which Tyler gradually recovers in the outer narrative and shares with readers in the inner narrative, avoids trivializing
her suffering or minimizing the terrible extent of her losses. Instead,
Mootoo crafts a multilayered novel that deals with trauma and recovery in terms of human interdependency, responsibility, and love, and
that compels readers to rethink their own response to the suffering of
others. Through Tyler’s guidance, she invites readers both to contemplate and to undertake that which Emmanuel Levinas terms “the most
profound adventure of subjectivity” (“Useless Suffering” 99): the opening or exposure of the self to the other’s “suffering—extreme passivity, helplessness, abandonment, and solitude—. . . the original call for
aid” (ibid. 93). But, unlike Levinas, Mootoo offers a perspective upon
human interrelatedness that explores not only the asymmetrical gift of
love by self to other but also the beauty of mutuality and reciprocity
in intersubjective relationships. In doing so, Mootoo strives to avoid
turning Mala’s story into “an edifying discourse . . . [or] preachment”
(ibid. 99) that would objectify the woman’s past and turn her suffering
into a moral example meant to teach readers, yet she also reveals the
importance of recognition and mutuality in the sharing and narration
of traumatic experiences. Tyler’s highly self-conscious reflections upon
his role in uncovering and narrating Mala’s history then allow Mootoo
to warn against the possible appropriation of victims’ experiences and
attempt to suggest the ways in which her readers may respond to the
helplessness of another, while respecting her or his difference from
themselves.
In his essay “Useless Suffering,” Levinas acknowledges the difficulty
of maintaining faith in a century of slaughter and genocide. One should
not try to rationalize another’s suffering or make it appear useful in
any way, he stresses; what he terms “the bad and gratuitous meaninglessness of pain” manifests itself in both human oppression and natural
disaster: “The arbitrariness and strange failure of justice amidst wars,
crimes, and the oppression of the weak by the strong, rejoin, in a sort
of fatality, the useless suffering that springs from natural plagues” (95).
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To try to claim that such suffering is justified as a part of God’s plan or
a way to atone for our sins is to place “in a suffering that is essentially
gratuitous and absurd, and apparently arbitrary, a meaning and order”
(96). And yet, he argues, the individual must also resist what he terms
the truly diabolical: the loss of faith occasioned by immeasurable or
incomprehensible suffering and the accompanying indifference that
would “abandon the world to useless suffering, leaving it to the political fatality—or drifting—of blind forces that inflict misfortune on the
weak and conquered” (99).
If, Levinas contends, we are neither to justify suffering as a part of
God’s plan nor to surrender to indifference or apathy, then the very
senselessness of suffering “demands even more from the resources of
the I in each one of us” (100). The helplessness and isolation of the
sufferer, he insists, who can neither escape from her pain unaided nor
give it a divine purpose, call out for the assistance of a fellow human
being; this extreme need gives rise to an expression of the spiritual that
reveals itself solely through interhuman relationships and the self’s
response to the “passivity, helplessness, abandonment, and solitude”
of the other, “the original call for aid, for curative help” (93). As
Samuel Moyn explains, “instead of discovering ethics from divine revelation, Levinas’ ethics involve the ‘deduction’ of God from human
revelation” (256). Levinas, he contends, shifts a “relationship based on
a response to the love of God to an interpersonal encounter between
human self and human other” (150). The “face of the other” compels
the self “to goodness and responsibility” (Perpich 45), and the transcendent, divine other is internalized “to the human realm in the form
of the human other” (Moyn 229). Thus, “the consciousness,” Levinas
argues, “of this inescapable obligation [to attend to the suffering of the
other, rather than depend on the intercession of an all-powerful God]
brings us close to God in a more difficult, but also a more spiritual,
way than does confidence in any kind of theodicy” (94).
In Cereus Blooms at Night, Tyler’s asymmetrical gift of love,
offered to the crazed, voiceless woman tied by leather straps to her
bed, reveals a commitment to the spiritual similar to that outlined by
Levinas, a commitment that expresses itself solely through interhuman
relationships and the self’s response to the need and abandonment
of the other. The brutal and repeated incestuous abuse of Mala, or
Pohpoh, as she is nicknamed as a child, denies the girl’s physical and
psychological integrity and represents the most extreme example of
a human being’s refusal to acknowledge both the autonomy and the
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dependence of the other. Even more damaging, the trauma leaves her
entrapped within an ongoing cycle of abuse and victimization. Just
as Levinas’s essay identifies helplessness and isolation as the defining
qualities of suffering and explains that the individual is irrevocably
confined within the boundaries of her or his own pain, with no ability
to move beyond it or outside it without the assistance of another, so,
too, Mootoo indicates that Mala is locked within the confines of her
past trauma. This paralysis is particularly well suggested by an early
moment in the novel, when the child Pohpoh encloses an ant within
a circle of chalk. At first it strives desperately to escape, but eventually it accepts its imprisonment, remaining motionless while the other
ants carefully ignore both prison and prisoner: “The ants outside the
circle marched up to the chalk line and one after the other backed off,
refusing to cross. The ant trapped in the circle ran around the inside
of the circle, frantically changing course, standing on its hind legs and
then crouching on the ground in panic. Outside the circle several ants
dropped their leaves and scurried back in the direction they came.
Within seconds a new path bypassing the circle had been created, and
the ants outside it hesitantly resumed their trek, more cautiously than
ever before. The ant in the circle stood completely still” (95). The ant’s
abandonment by its fellows captures perfectly the reality of Pohpoh’s
own situation. As she ages, her isolation increases until she refuses to
step outside the fence that surrounds her property: the boundaries that
she marks off with snail shells, described as being as white as chalk, set
out the external limitations of her world as well as represent the inner
circle that her traumatic experiences have engraved inside her mind.13
But in responding to rather than violating Mala’s helplessness and
dependent vulnerability, Tyler resists the loss of faith and love occasioned by her father’s actions. He opens himself to the spiritual, or the
face of the other, by recognizing Mala’s forsaken helplessness and seeing it as a call directed toward his compassion. Rather than attempting
to explain her pain by seeing it as a deserved punishment, or casting it
as a part of God’s inscrutable plan, a tribulation to be rewarded in the
afterlife (Levinas, “Useless Suffering” 96), Tyler listens to and answers
the need of the insane woman whom society has abandoned—first to
the abuse of her father and then to the ridicule of her community.
Mala also displays a similar capacity for selfless love and compassion, Tyler’s inner narrative makes clear; her refusal to be indifferent
to the suffering of others, whether human or nonhuman, allows her
to preserve the most essential part of herself, her responsibility “‘for-
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the-other’” (Levinas, “Uniqueness” 194). The demand, Levinas argues,
that others’ suffering places upon us is the means by which we realize
our “non-interchangeability”; our uniqueness is confirmed through our
“nontransferable and unimpeachable responsibility” in the face of the
exposed vulnerability of the other (ibid. 248). Mala’s willingness to
mother her younger sister Asha and ignore her own needs allows
her, despite the disintegration of self caused by the senseless violation
inflicted upon her, to retain the potential to give and receive love.
While Mootoo underlines the redemptive nature of both Mala’s and
Tyler’s responsibility “for-the-other” and suggests, as Levinas argues,
that these asymmetrical gifts of love help them retain or confirm their
subjectivity, Mootoo also explores the restorative qualities of mutuality and reciprocity in human relationships.14 Mala’s repeated question,
“Where Asha?” which is, at first, the only phrase she will speak in the
almshouse, serves as a symbolic reminder of her selfless sacrifice for
her sister and her continuing capacity to love and care for another.
However, the question, directed at Tyler and repeated to the reader,
also signifies the growing reciprocity between Tyler and Mala and the
necessity of having others recognize Mala’s self-sacrifice. Similarly,
Tyler emphasizes mutuality and reciprocity in the relationships that he
constructs with both Mala and the readers whom he directly addresses,
and he underlines the importance of a two-way exchange between self
and other.
When Mala first arrives at the charity home, Tyler literally and
symbolically acts as her mother, initiating the psychological rebirth and
rediscovery of love that will follow. While Mala had earlier alternated
between a state of complete alienation from others to one of catastrophic engulfment by them, Tyler’s touch, which recognizes her on a
nonverbal level, helps reestablish her capacity to feel both connected
to and yet separate from others. In her response to Levinas’s Totality
and Infinity, Luce Irigaray emphasizes the primacy of touch in interhuman relationships, whether between mother and child or between
lovers: “Before orality comes to be, touch is already in existence. No
nourishment can compensate for the grace or work of touching. Touch
makes it possible to wait, to gather strength, so that the other will
return to caress and reshape, from within and from without, a flesh
that is given back to itself in the gesture of love. . . . The other’s hands,
those palms with which he approaches without going through me,
give me back the borders of my body and call me to the remembrance
of the most profound intimacy” (121). Similarly, Tyler’s touch helps
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restore Mala’s sense of the boundaries of her own body and the possibility of a loving and intimate connection with others. Through his
gentle caress of the hair on her forehead, Tyler attempts to reassure her
on a physical level: “I wanted her to feel in my touch that I would not
harm her” (16–17). He also uses his physical presence and contact to
comfort her in the first night she spends at the almshouse: “I sat by her
head, slipped my arm under her back and pulled her into my arms. I
held her against my chest, rocking her until the first streaks of morning
light broke through the pitch-black sky” (22). Later, he spends long
hours holding the terrified old woman in his arms; he hand-feeds her;
and he washes, dresses, and talks to her. Most important, his touch
allows him both to recognize her as a person, separate from himself
and more than the rumors that seek to define her, and yet able to be
touched—that is, both physically and emotionally connected to or
empathized with. When he first strokes her hair, “this one touch turned
her from the incarnation of fearful tales into a living human being, an
elderly person such as those I had dedicated my life to serving” (11).
If Tyler’s love informs the physical touch that restores Mala to a
sense of the boundaries of her own body, it also reveals itself in the
touch of his imagination. His imaginative empathy allows him to touch
Mala not just physically, in the present, but also in the past, through
the cocreation of a personal history that allows Mala both to expose
herself to others and yet to mark herself off as separate from them.
As her trust in Tyler grows, Mala gradually begins to recover language, signaling her reentry into the human world that had excluded
her. Tyler’s interest in recording and understanding her story, and his
willingness to act as the witness of her suffering, encourage Mala to
uncover herself further. Tyler relates: “When she saw me awaiting her
next word and writing it down as soon as she uttered it, she drew
nearer. I soon got the impression that she actually began to whisper
in my direction, that I had become her witness. She spoke rapidly
and with great urgency, in a low monotone, repeating herself, sometimes for hours without end. . . . It became apparent that the question
‘Where Asha?’—usually asked without emotion or nuance—was not
idle rambling. There was a purpose to it and to all the chatter, and
finally a purpose to my listening and to sifting, cutting, and sewing
the lot” (107). When he pieces together Mala’s narrative from its
rambling, repetitious fragments, his assistance helps make her whole:
he brings together the shattered pieces of her life into a unity in which
her past, in being clearly marked off from her present, will no longer
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possess her, holding her paralyzed in its unforgiving grasp. Thus Tyler’s
touch reveals itself in both physical and creative terms and manifests
what Irigaray terms the “fecundity of a love” that lies in an “infinity
of empathy with the other [and] . . . whose most elementary gesture,
or deed, remains the caress” (120). Initiating and fulfilling the “call to
birth of the self and other” (ibid. 120), Tyler’s imaginative fecundity
aids Mala in reestablishing the physical boundaries of her body and
embarking on relationships built on mutuality and reciprocity. It also
gives birth to the story that the two build together and enables and
unfolds the gradual shift in Mala’s response to her traumatic memories.
In particular, the complex interplay between inner and outer narratives allows Mootoo to envision the increasingly dynamic exchange
between Mala’s inner, or intrapsychic, world, which is locked in the
events of the past, and her interpersonal relationships in the present.
Her outer, first-person narrative follows Tyler in the present, as he
gradually gains Mala’s trust and establishes an intimate relationship
with the terrified, apparently insane old woman. After undergoing
three separate experiences of abandonment, first by her mother, then
by her beloved younger sister, and finally by her lover Ambrose, Mala
has become locked within her mind, enduring the endless repetition
of the moments when she was left, alone, to face her father’s violent
rage.15 Tyler’s inner narrative, a third-person account, weaves together
his imaginative re-creation of the memories that Mala later confides to
him with the information about her past that he obtains from other
sources. This account is further split into the stories he reconstructs of
Mala’s adult past and of her childhood.
By closely intertwining the inner and outer narratives, Mootoo
suggests that Tyler’s response to Mala’s physical needs, her fear, and
her desperation resonates through the inner layers of her self, unfolded
in the different levels of the novel. Reverberating back into the past,
Tyler’s love and care not only aid the elderly Mala in the nursing home
but also reach back to the woman whose adult life was destroyed by
insanity and even to her despised child self, the little girl nicknamed
Pohpoh. While the events of the past cannot be altered, Mootoo sets
out the different ways in which they can be reexperienced and reinterpreted, ways closely dependent on and influenced by people in the
present.
The dynamic interaction between inner and outer narratives also
allows the creation of a potential space that brings the terrible fixity
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of Mala’s past into contact with the limitless possibility of fantasy,
creativity, and love. In an essay on overcoming the effects of childhood
trauma, Evelyn Pye emphasizes the role that imagination and fantasy
play in transforming individuals’ personal histories. Traumatic experience, Pye argues, disables the imagination, because it renders a person
completely helpless in the face of her environment (179). When the
survivor later recalls her memories, her original sense of powerlessness
may continue to control the way in which she remembers and experiences the past; she feels possessed by her own memories. Thus Pye
emphasizes the importance of being able to shift from one understanding of self, in which the “individual experiences him—or herself as the
victim of incommensurable forces including his or her own memories,
fantasies, emotions, and body,” to a second, in which “the individual
is a subject with a history who can reflect on his or her memories and
fantasies and who . . . [is] able to enter potential space and the full
humanity of [her or his] imagination” (181). Tyler’s love for and assistance to Mala, revealed in the frame narrative of the present, help her
reestablish the boundaries between her inner world and her external environment and separate past traumatic memories from present
experience. In the potential space that opens up for her, Mala is able
to liberate her imagination from its paralyzed entrapment within the
repetitive playing out of her memories and to begin to alter her inner
experiencing and interpretation of her past.16
In his accounts of the earliest parts of her life, Tyler reveals the devastating progress of Mala’s alienation from herself, as well as from the
support and assistance of her community. Repeatedly traumatized, she
gradually loses the capacity to be “an authentic witness to [her]self”
and comes, as well, to accept her isolation from the rest of humanity
and “the absence of an addressable other, an other who can hear the
anguish of one’s memories and thus affirm and recognize their realness” (Felman and Laub 68). As a child Pohpoh learns to dissociate her
anger against her father. In a rare outburst, she whispers to her sister,
“I wish Papa was dead. . . . I hate him. I hate him. I wish he was dead”
(96), but for the most part she comes to disown her own sensory experiences and emotions and to treat her body as an object separate from
herself. She also silences the vulnerable, loving part of herself that
is most wounded by the abuse and refuses to hear its need, its longing for nurturance and protection. Her intrapsychic world gradually
replicates the indifferent response of her community: mimicking the
stony silence of the external world that abandons her to her father’s
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281
assault, she turns “stone-blank eyes” (153) on her inner self’s anguish
and rage and goes into her father’s bedroom, “as if it were nothing at
all” (72). In thus denying her own pain and suppressing “the temptation to indulge in yearning—yearning to have her mother back next
to her, to feel her mother hugging her” (153), she protects herself
by “squeezing the entire psychic life out of the inhumanly suffering
body” (Ferenczi, Clinical Diary 9). Such fragmentation and denial
allow her to survive but create a body without a spirit; she becomes
what Ferenczi describes as “a body progressively divested of its soul,
whose disintegration is not perceived at all or is regarded as an event
happening to another person, being watched from the outside” (ibid.
9). Ferenczi’s words also help explain the nature of the prison in which
Mala finds herself increasingly confined: her necessary detachment
from her own pain leaves her unable to describe the violation done to
her, but in leaving her abuse unspoken, “as if it were nothing at all,”
she helplessly acquiesces to her own objectification and accepts that
her pain has no significance. Identifying with her victimizer, Mala, like
many abuse victims, “has no credible text, no witnesses, no capacity
to bear witness” (Nachmani 204).
Mala’s growing distance from herself, and from her deep need to
trust, nurture, and love others, culminates in the moment when she
murders her father. While the child Pohpoh had been gentle and compassionate, trying to protect both her sister and animals from wanton
human cruelty, the adult Mala becomes an external embodiment of
her father’s self-hate and destructiveness. Filled with the feelings of
fury and ineffective powerlessness that he has emptied into her, she
is transformed into someone whom even her lover barely knows, “an
unrecognizable wild creature with a blood-stained face, frothing at
the mouth and hacking uncontrollably at the furniture in the drawing
room” (246). She kills her father in a rage so violent that she finishes
her attack by banging a door, over and over, against his head.
The decades of insanity that follow this murder complete Mala’s
silencing, for she becomes unable to listen to herself or to trust that
others may listen to her. Living as a recluse in her family house, she
repeats each year the moments of her abandonment, and each year she
reconfirms the way in which language fails to enable her to express her
own pain or to address an other, whether human or divine. When her
memories return at the advent of each rainy season, she cries “out the
only words she had spoken in ages” and pleads, “Oh God. I beg you.
Please. Doh leave me, I beg you, oh God, oh God, doh leave me, I beg-
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gin you. Take me with you” (143). But the only response to her anguish
is an eerie emptiness that underlines her isolation, a silence in which
her pain is neither comforted nor ridiculed but simply not recognized,
as though it were felt in a void in which it had no meaning or purpose.
Redirecting her psychic agony into a more manageable form of physical pain, Mala fills her mouth with a specially prepared hot pepper
sauce, in a deliberate ritual that burns her tongue until it becomes “so
blistered that parts of the top layer had already disintegrated and other
areas had curled back like rose petals dipped in acid” (143). She is able
to survive the inner agony caused by her feelings of loss, but only at
the cost of once again disowning the part of herself that seeks to have
her suffering recognized. Thus, each time that she attempts to speak
and is left unanswered by the rest of the world, Mala is confirmed in
her sense that her pain cannot be conveyed to others, that it is too terrible even to be acknowledged to herself. With each reenactment of her
experience of assault and abandonment, she more deeply engraves the
circle that confines her within her own mind.
In the last of Mala’s experiences of abandonment, however, Tyler’s
physical presence in the outer narrative, paralleled by his imaginative
presence in the inner narrative, means that the elderly woman is no
longer left unaided and alone. As Tyler reconstructs the final events
that lead to Mala’s removal from her house and her forcible incarceration in the Paradise Alms House, his narrative at first reinforces the
sense in which the old woman in still entrapped within a continuing
cycle of humiliation, degradation, and rejection, a cycle that plays itself
out in both her intrapsychic and interpersonal worlds. Accosted by
police who have come to investigate the discovery of a corpse in her
house—the body of her murdered father—the elderly woman retreats
inside a memory in which the child Pohpoh returns from a lonely
nighttime adventure after being sexually assaulted. Just as the ongoing
events in her adult life mirror the victimization of her childhood, her
inward experiencing of them is the same: collapsing present into past,
she is at once both the abused child, cast out from her community, and
the ostracized old woman, ridiculed by the police.
But, as Tyler continues, his inner narrative begins to show the way
in which Mala’s interpretation of the past is being influenced by the circumstances of the present. The events of the frame narrative, in which
Tyler’s love has helped her reestablish the boundaries of her body and
mark off the separation between her inner self and the external world,
as well as that between self and other, open up the creative potential
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283
space in which she is no longer frozen within a repetition of the events
of the past. In this space, she is able not only to speak the events of the
past to another but, more importantly, to reexperience them and reinterpret them differently in the present. For the first time, even if only in
her memories and imagination, the elderly Mala is able to protect her
child self, to, as she had wished, “go back in time and be a friend to this
Pohpoh” (153). She waits, “decid[ing] that if trouble was indeed on its
way her first duty was to save and care for Pohpoh” (185). The collapsing of the present into the past and the intrusion of the past into the
present become even more pronounced as Tyler continues. In order to
capture the fragmented “co-conscious mental operations” (Reis 221)
characteristic of trauma survivors, his narrative shifts, with an often
dizzying rapidity, between the experiences of the child Pohpoh standing in the garden and those of the old woman being interrogated by
the police. In a climactic moment, Tyler tells us that Pohpoh manages
to remember the abuse she usually dissociates: the sight of Pohpoh’s
“paunchy” father “was unprying her memory. She was reminded of
what she usually ignored or commanded herself to forget: her legs
being ripped apart, something entering her from down there, entering
and then scooping her insides out.” But, simultaneously, the elderly
“Mala remembered. She heard the voices of the police. She reconfigured what they said to match her story of how she saved Pohpoh that
day” (188).
As Tyler’s retelling continues, Pohpoh is almost overwhelmed by
the fear and pain that her memories of abuse trigger; however, as she
struggles to regain the customary state of stony imperviousness that
has always protected her, she realizes that “this time there was a difference. Pohpoh felt, for once, that she was not alone” (189). Tyler’s love,
enfolding Mala in the outer narrative and embodied in his physical
touch, allows Mala, in a similar way, to touch the vulnerable part of
herself that she had dissociated and to accompany and care for her previously despised child self. As Tyler has been her mother, holding, cherishing, and loving her, she gains the power, in revisiting the past, to hug
“the taut, stiff child” and offer her words of comfort. She tells Pohpoh,
“Things bad at home, child? I understand. I understand everything.
Everything. Today is the last day that anybody will ever be able to
reach you” (199). In Tyler’s reenvisioning of Mala’s past, the traumatic
reenactments that had tormented Mala her whole life become a means
for her to enter the past and provide a previously denied comfort to the
part of herself still locked within the inner space in which she repeats
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the experience of the abuse. But she is able to do so because Tyler’s love
for her in the frame narrative also accompanies her and provides the
changed interpersonal relationship that helps her experience the inner
reliving of her past differently. The assistance on the part of Tyler, as
Ferenczi and Michael Balint theorize in their discussions of the interaction between analyst and analysand, allows Mala’s whole intrapsychic
world to shift. She accepts rather than denies Pohpoh’s vulnerability
and need for love, and in becoming reunited with this lost but valued
aspect of her self, she “reconstitutes the internal ‘thou,’ and thus the
possibility of a witness or a listener inside [her]self” (Felman and Laub
85). In turn, her restored capacity to listen to herself and accept the
anguish she had previously dissociated reflects and reinforces her reestablishment of relationships with external others, first Tyler and then
Ambrose, her girlhood lover.
The final image in this section of Tyler’s inner narrative underlines
the way in which Mala has been liberated from her enmeshment within
a paralyzing repetition of the past and suggests the as yet undiscovered
future of possibility and freedom opening up before both her and
Tyler. Early in the novel, Pohpoh longs to escape her father’s abuse
and the increasingly constrictive confines of her inner and outer world
by transforming herself into “a frigate bird soaring with other frigates
until her town below was swallowed up, consumed in an unidentifiable
fleck of island adrift like a speck of dust in a vast turquoise seascape”
(104). Later, when the elderly Mala is finally able to protect her vulnerable child self, she also envisions Pohpoh escaping the terrible pain
caused by her father’s abuse and her mother’s abandonment. As the
police prepare to arrest her for the murder of her father, she urges the
imaginary child beside her, “Yes Pohpoh, you take off and fly, child,
fly!” (200). Through the assistance of Tyler’s and Mala’s imaginations, her childhood longing is finally fulfilled: “Pohpoh bent her body
forward, and, as though doing a breast stroke, began to part the air
with her arms. . . . She practised making perfect, broad circles, like a
frigate bird splayed out against the sky in an elegant V. Down below,
her island was soon lost among others, all as shapeless as specks of
dust adrift on a vast turquoise sea ” (200–201). The image powerfully
suggests the way in which Mala herself, through Tyler’s assistance,
begins to free her spirit from the blind and tyrannical repetition of past
trauma, an emancipation that is more fully realized in the conclusion
of the frame story. Watching the old woman sitting on the bench and
sharing the company of her childhood lover, Ambrose Mohanty, Tyler
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sees her suddenly point toward “a distant flight pattern that she alone
could see. She laughed as her eyes followed what her fingers described,
and waved to whatever it was she saw. . . . In a tiny whispering voice,
she uttered her first public words: ‘Poh, Pohpohpoh, Poh, Poh, Poh’”
(269). As Mala follows the imaginary progress of her child self—and
her liberated spirit—now flying free across the sky, Mootoo suggests
that the elderly woman is about to embark on a future that will not
be predetermined by her father’s degrading brutality but will instead
be expressed through her own capacity to love and imagine; she enters
the “grace of a future,” as Irigaray puts it, “that none can control”
(120).
In Tyler’s actions and in his imaginative re-creation of Mala’s history, Mootoo reveals the redemptive power of his gift of love and
compassion and explores the acts of grace that may redeem human
cruelty. While she emphasizes the selflessness in Tyler’s initial response
to the elderly woman, she ultimately draws out the mutuality of the
relationship between Tyler and Mala—a reciprocity that recognizes
and draws on the resilient generosity of Mala’s spirit. They respond to
each other as “two active subjects [who] may exchange, may alternate
in expressing and receiving, cocreating a mutuality that allows for and
presumes separateness” (Benjamin 29). Thus, if Tyler’s inner narrative
helps reinterpret her life in order to show the value that had lain, unregarded, beneath decades of madness, then his outer narrative reveals
the ways in which Mala’s story has dramatically changed his perspective on himself. Both inner and outer narratives ultimately function as
cocreated products that are neither entirely Mala’s nor Tyler’s; instead
they re-create the dynamics of Mala and Tyler’s exchange, what Jessica
Benjamin, in her study of intersubjectivity, terms the potential space or
“third term” created by human interaction, a “dance that is distinct
from the dancers yet cocreated by them” (28). They reveal the courage
that had enabled Mala to speak her story and the love and compassion
with which Tyler listens and retells it; and just as Tyler’s narrative of
her life is a gift that gives back to her an image of self transformed by
his love for her, so, too, Mala’s bravery and generosity help give rise to
Tyler’s new acceptance of himself.17
While offering hope in its depiction of Mala’s recovery of the ability
to love and imagine and in its redemption of interpersonal relationships, Mootoo’s novel never becomes what historian and trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra dismisses as a “facile narrative of redemption,”
through which “one derives from the suffering of others something
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career-enhancing, ‘spiritually’ uplifting, or identity-forming for oneself
or one’s group” (98–99).18 Instead, Mootoo carefully reflects upon her
role and the role of her readers in understanding, representing, and
responding to another’s trauma, and she creates, in Tyler, a complex
figure whose position within the novel combines that of audience and
writer. In establishing the space that enables Mala to speak, and then
in listening to her story, Tyler delineates the ways in which readers may
respond to the helplessness of another while respecting her difference
from themselves and avoiding assimilating the victim’s identity into
the self. His actions suggest that the self is most fully challenged (or
realized) when responding to her responsibility for the other, and he
encourages readers to undertake the “adventure in subjectivity” (Levinas, “Useless Suffering” 99) that begins with the refusal to be indifferent to the vulnerability and need of the other. But as the historian who
recovers, pieces together, and retells Mala’s story, Tyler enters into a
two-way and dynamic exchange with both Mala and the readers, one
in which the encounter with the other is based not on a sense of the
other’s absolute difference from self but rather on a recognition of both
difference and similarity.
Thus, as the historian who recovers and then narrates Mala’s past,
Tyler adopts storytelling methods that attempt the “empathic unsettlement” described by historian LaCapra. In his discussion of the ethical
way to write trauma, LaCapra argues that both historian and reader,
in serving as witnesses to the trauma of the past, need to maintain a
balance between empathy and distance. It is legitimate, he contends,
to engage readers’ empathy, because the emotional connection encourages action and compassion, and he acknowledges that no engagement
with another can be entirely objective. However, readers and historian
must remain sufficiently detached so that they do not absorb the other’s
identity into their own or appropriate her or his traumatic experiences
for their own self-serving ends. Similarly, Tyler’s narrative encourages
an identification with Mala, while also insisting that both he and the
readers recognize their difference and avoid a too-easy appropriation
of the victim’s position—a position to which they are not entitled and
which encourages an identification with the sufferer’s powerlessness
that precludes the possibility of action.19
Mootoo thus underscores that Tyler, for all his compassion, might
unintentionally use Mala’s experience to try to win sympathy for himself, and she has him consciously guard against such an appropriation.
She also explores the potential dangers in his imaginative capacity to
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287
feel Mala’s suffering, fear, and anguish as his own. On the one hand,
his imagination compels him, almost against his will, to respond to
her unspoken cry for assistance. “She was beginning to perturb me,”
he notes as he reflects upon the sleeping woman, “not because I feared
her but rather because I felt an empathy for her clenched fists, defiant
stare, pursed lips, and deep, slow, calculated breathing—an empathy
that words alone cannot describe” (21). Yet on the other hand, he at
once recognizes the dangers of an unquestioned identification with
someone who is too powerless and frail to speak for herself: she risks
becoming nothing more than the screen onto which Tyler can project
his own feelings of being unfairly excluded by the people of Paradise,
an objectification that would repeat the soul murder of Mala’s father.
Thus, he immediately qualifies his statement, reflecting, “On the other
hand, perhaps my intuition was nothing more than recalcitrant yearning, for I did fancy that she and I shared a common reception from the
rest of the world” (21).
In Tyler’s early reflections, Mootoo particularly foregrounds the
ease with which an attempt to help the vulnerable can slide into a selfaggrandizing heroics that uses another’s suffering in order to gratify
one’s own feelings of omnipotence. After his first efforts to alleviate the
old woman’s terrified agony, Tyler is momentarily filled with an elated
self-congratulation. He tells us, “My brain was giddy, joyous with
constant recitation of the events with Miss Ramchandin. While they
played in my head, I imagined further successes, immeasurable feats
that I might accomplish with my great understanding and magnanimity.” But he quickly mocks his own vanity, observing with a humorous
self-deprecation that “finally, nausea at my own ballooning sense of
self wore me down and I slept.” Mootoo also moves him to further
self-questioning when he is called back to help the old woman later
in the night. Hearing her “mournful wailing[,] . . . an eerie and agonizing din” (18) that disturbs all the residents in the home, he enters
her bungalow and finds her soaked in her own urine. Engulfed by the
thick stench of her fear, he recognizes that he is not as all-powerful as
his “ballooning” conceit had temporarily led him to believe; he begins
to understand that while he can relate to her pain, its paralyzing, allconsuming intensity belongs to Mala alone and can never be fully
grasped by another. Nor can it be contained within a glib narrative
in which she suffers in order to provide him with an opportunity for
heroic compassion and “further successes [and] immeasurable feats.”
Instead he recognizes the senselessness of her pain, a recognition that
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replaces elation with a shaken awareness of his own vulnerability and
limitations. These reflections reveal Tyler’s struggles to negotiate a
middle road between two opposing responses to Mala: too close an
identification on the one hand and despair at the incomprehensibility of her suffering on the other. He tries to balance between these
responses—both to be able to assist her through his empathy and yet
to remain aware of his own difference from her and to respect her suffering as uniquely her own.
Tyler also adopts a narrative style that both LaCapra and Laurie
Vickroy particularly link to narratives of trauma; he attempts to recreate and then place readers within the fragmented interior of Mala’s
mind, so that they share her pain-filled inner reality and her sense of
being frozen in the violent reenactment of her past.20 The disorientation and confusion he seeks to re-create in readers is particularly aided
through his seamless transitions between Mala’s immediate and distant
past, showing the way in which she slides helplessly between past
memories and present experience, often unable to distinguish between
or separate the two. Similarly, he blurs the line between her outer and
inner reality, so that readers experience the destabilizing effect of being
menaced by inner delusions so vivid that her dead father, because of
his continuing presence in her mind, can continue to terrify her decades
later. Trapped in this claustrophobic world, which slips dizzyingly
between memory and fantasy, past and present, delusion and reality,
readers begin partially to experience Mala’s suffocating confinement
within her abusive past.
In conveying Mala’s terrible paralysis in the face of both her actual
abuse and her memories of her past, Tyler thus subjects readers to what
LaCapra terms a “secondary trauma” or unsettlement.21 In particular,
he captures the terrible feeling of inevitability that accompanies the
reenactments of her experience, the way in which Mala awaits the
return of her memories with a paralyzing sense of dread and helplessness that replicates the emotions that had accompanied the original
trauma. Each year, he narrates, as the rainy season approaches, Mala
begins to prepare her hot pepper sauce, getting ready to ward off the
agony of abandonment and to deal with the moment in which her
past literally becomes her physical reality in the present. As she waits,
the tension becomes increasingly unbearable. She feels overwhelmed
by the “suffocating pervasiveness of stagnant water” and notes with
dread that “the elements seemed to pull together in perfect imitation
of another moment, long ago, just after a heavy rainfall.” Finally, her
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terror dissolves the boundaries between her inner reality and outer environment and the barriers between past and present. The external world
begins to resonate with her despairing anguish, and she hears again the
fateful words that Asha had spoken repeated in “the noise of insects
screaming, ‘Pohpoh, Pohpoh, I want Pohpoh’” (141). Increasingly
panicked, she can do nothing but let the memory continue to manifest
itself through her and relive the moment when her younger sister had
leapt from the safety of the carriage and returned to Mala and their
enraged father Ramchandin. When the sun reaches a particular height,
the intrusion of the past becomes most intense and unbearable: “She
opened her eyes just in time to see the jagged piece of galvanized iron
ignite like a brilliant sparkler. The cacophony in her head resounded.
Insects shrieked. Mammy. Asha. Pohpoh. Lavinia. The rumbling of a
buggy” (142). At this moment, she is possessed by her past, and all the
pain that she had earlier denied rises up inside her, becoming so intense
that it seems to fill even her external world, leaving her unable to separate herself from the physical reenactment of her memories.
Tyler continues to unsettle his audience in his description of Ramchandin’s last, most terrible assault on Mala. Not only does he graphically detail the way in which Ramchandin alternately rapes, beats, and
sodomizes his daughter but, more disturbingly, he again telescopes
past into present, suggesting how the abuse is a terrible recurring cycle
from which Mala cannot escape. In this last assault, Ramchandin
“threw her on the mattress of his sagging bed and ripped her dress off.
She shut her eyes and cried out loudly. It was the first time since that
very first time when she was a child that she had felt so much pain”
(241). Mala’s inward paralysis in the face of her memories, Tyler’s narrative indicates, is mercilessly paralleled and reinforced by her outward
powerlessness in the face of her environment.
While Tyler’s style unsettles readers so that they experience a dislocating “secondary trauma,” which makes it impossible to impose
a neat pattern on Mala’s suffering or give it a meaningful explanation, Mootoo simultaneously insists that they maintain a degree of
detachment from Mala’s situation so that they do not simply identify
and empathize with her. Thus Tyler’s narrative maintains a tension
between a “critical, necessarily objectifying reconstruction and [an]
affective response to the voices of victims” (LaCapra 109). It creates
a sometimes overwhelming sense of Mala’s trauma—her confusion,
disorientation, and madness; her sense of utter isolation and abandonment; and her engulfing feelings of powerlessness—and subjects
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readers to graphic descriptions of sexual assault; yet it also demands
a commitment to piecing together Mala’s fragmented life. It actively
engages readers in working out the connections between the immediate past and the more distant history of Mala’s childhood and between
Mala’s recovered memories and the fantasies of her inner world. At
each stage of the novel, they must renew Tyler’s commitment to helping patch together Mala’s life by struggling to put together the broken
pieces that Tyler gives them. They are sufficiently unsettled so that they
may recognize their own vulnerability to traumatic experience and
abandonment and overcome the smug complacence of the Paradise
townspeople, who maintain both a literal and a psychological distance
from the knowledge of Mala’s suffering. But in staying sufficiently
detached rather than giving in to despair or disgust, readers retain the
power to act on, reflect on, and take responsibility for helping resolve
traumatic repetitions of violence.
Ultimately, in carefully reflecting upon his own role in uncovering
Mala’s history and striving to engage the reader closely in her or his
experiencing of Mala’s story, Tyler seeks to create the same dynamic,
shared interaction between reader and text that Mootoo so carefully
establishes in the relationship between Mala and Tyler and in the interplay between inner and outer narratives. If Tyler not only tells the story
but also communicates the story of the telling of the story, as Simon,
Rosenberg, and Eppert recommend in their study of ethical recountings of trauma, he encourages a similar engagement from the reader.
That is, he pushes them to be open to a dynamic exchange with Mala’s
history, reflecting and acting upon its effects on them. Thus Tyler
openly addresses his readers, urging them to aid Mala in discovering
her lost sister: “By setting this story down, I, Tyler, . . . am placing
trust in the power of the printed word to reach many people. It is my
ardent hope that Asha Ramchandin, at one time a resident in the town
of Paradise, Lantanacamara, will chance upon this book, wherever
she may be today, and recognize herself and her family. If you are not
Asha Ramchandin . . . but know her or someone you suspect might be
her or even related to her, please present this and ask that she read it”
(3). While his carefully crafted plea is obviously a rhetorical fiction, it
also invites readers to look at the people around them with different
eyes, to respond to them with sympathy and compassion, rather than
indifference.
Tyler’s appeal that readers be open to those who appear most different from them and most vulnerable is particularly reinforced when
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291
he recounts the story of the gardener Hector and his beloved older
brother. Like Mala and Asha, the two siblings have been separated
from each other since childhood, for the older boy had been forced to
leave their village because of their father’s intolerance of his homosexuality. Tyler parallels this tale of disappearance and loss, which Hector
still mourns, with the two little girls’ childhood experiences in which
they are not only assaulted by their father but also shunned by the
townspeople and bullied by their children. These characters—Hector,
his homosexual brother, and the two little girls—are separated from
themselves or from those who love them because of others’ unwillingness to show tolerance, compassion, or acceptance. If they do manage
to survive, it is only by disowning the most valued part of themselves
or relinquishing those with whom they are most intimate: Asha must
turn her back on the sister who had cared for her as a mother, Mala
must suppress the vulnerable part of herself that craves protection
and recognition from others, and Hector’s brother leaves behind the
sibling and the mother who had both loved him. Reflecting upon the
depth of these losses, Tyler mourns the destruction of all that is most
precious to the human self, the intimate ties of trust and codependence that bind people together into meaningful relationships but are
discarded or denied in order to survive: “Today Asha, watching your
sister sit in her one-room bungalow stroking a cat she calls ‘Pohpoh’
sometimes and ‘Asha’ other times, I do feel despair. I wonder at how
many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far
away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going
mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble
than the other. They are merely simply different ways of coping, and
we each must cope as best as we can” (96–97).
Tyler then ends the novel ambivalently, poised between hopefulness
and despair. Mala’s rediscovery of the ability to give and receive love
is symbolized by the restoration of Asha’s long-lost letters. Filled with
concern for the sister whom she had left behind, Asha’s voice appears
to speak directly from the past, confirming the enduring strength and
truth of the love they had shared. But despite Mala’s joy, the novel
ends where it had begun, by invoking Asha’s absence and denying the
readers closure. After telling the story, which is meant to help reunite
the two siblings, Tyler concludes his plea for both Asha’s and the
reader’s assistance by reflecting upon Mala’s longing to be restored to
her sister and all that she represents: “Not a day passes that you [Asha]
are not foremost in our minds. We await a letter, and better yet, your
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arrival. She expects you any day soon. You are, to her, the promise of
a cereus-scented breeze on a Paradise night” (270). Asha’s continuing
absence symbolizes all that Mala has lost in her life and which cannot
be redeemed by human action: trust, innocence, and security in her
childhood; companionship and love as an adult. But the promise of her
return betokens the as yet unknown potential Mala still has to fulfill
the last years of her life and to explore a future that will no longer be
predetermined by her past.
In these words, which echo back to his opening plea for his readers’ assistance, Tyler implies that the ultimate conclusion of Mala’s
story will be determined by the readers and their willingness to be
open to, rather than distant from, the suffering of others. Readers,
Mootoo indicates, are not meant to be the passive recipients of Mala’s
tale, to engage in an easy identification with her in which her paralysis
and helplessness are used to entertain, or to justify their own despair.
Neither are they meant to use her experiences to support a loss of
faith in the power of love and goodness. Instead, her narrator Tyler
places readers in a creative and open-ended exchange with the novel,
challenging them to work within the potential space created by their
imaginative and empathic response to the text and so to arrive at a new
understanding of those different from themselves. If they listen to her
story with compassion, share it with others, and act upon the demands
it places on them, they increase the likelihood of the lost finding their
way home and feeling accepted within human society. Thus Mootoo
ultimately places the tantalizing promise of Asha’s return within the
readers’ willingness to follow Mala’s and Tyler’s acts of imagination,
generosity, and love.
Notes
1. See, for example, Casteel, Hoving, Howells, and May.
2.Even May, who focuses on the way the novel “highlights the violence
at the heart of both sexual politics and colonization through the story of Mala
Ramchandin” (97), examines Mala primarily as an example and symbol of the
consequences of colonialism. She does not consider Mala’s experiencing of the incestuous abuse or Mootoo’s representation of traumatic experience in any detail.
3.In her 1998 interview with the Ottawa Citizen’s Paul Gessel, for example, Mootoo discussed her attempts, as a five-year-old, to tell her grandmother
of her family friends’ sexual abuse. Her grandmother, however, told her not to
speak of it again, and it was only when she was in her thirties and began writing
that she was able to put her feelings into words.
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4.In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra develops the
concept of what he terms “empathic unsettlement,” a means of writing about
or responding to another’s trauma with a combination of affect and critical distance. Such a balance, he contends, allows a “responsive[ness] to the traumatic
experience of others, notably of victims, . . . [without appropriating] their experience” (41), becoming overwhelmed by their pain, or co-opting their suffering.
5. Literary analyses that focus on the resolution provided by narrating
traumatic experience include Suzette A. Henke’s study of women’s life writing,
Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, and Laurie
Vickroy’s Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. Approaches such as
Henke’s and Vickroy’s draw heavily on the work of feminist and psychologist Judith Herman, particularly her Trauma and Recovery. Psychoanalytic approaches
that look at the importance of narrative in helping individuals and societies deal
with traumatic experience include Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony:
Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History; Evelyn Pye’s
“Memory and Imagination: Placing Imagination in the Therapy of Individuals
with Incest Memories”; and the collection of essays edited by Richard Gartner,
Memories of Sexual Betrayal: Truth, Fantasy, Repression, and Dissociation.
6. The best-known and most influential proponent of this perspective is
Cathy Caruth, whose work Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and
History argues that trauma is largely incomprehensible and impossible to conceptualize or represent. Caruth’s emphasis on humanity’s death drive and the
entirely unexpected nature of the traumatic experience draws heavily from Freud
and downplays the importance of the interpersonal element both in causing and
resolving trauma. While Caruth’s approach is echoed in such works as Petar
Ramadanovic’s Forgetting Futures: On Memory, Trauma, and Identity and actively championed by Felman, it has also been sharply criticized by scholars such
as Ruth Leys.
7. See, for example, the approaches adopted by Michael S. Roth in The
Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History; Robert I.
Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert, the editors of Between Hope and
Despair: Pedagogy and the Remembrance of Historical Trauma; and LaCapra in
Writing History, Writing Trauma.
8.In what is now considered a seminal essay on childhood sexual trauma,
“Confusion of Tongues Between Adults and Children,” Sándor Ferenczi, a close
colleague and friend of Freud, first explored the way in which children’s dependency on their parents brings them to “identify themselves with their aggressor”
(162) and to deny or dissociate a whole body of painful experience that does not
accord with their abusers’ perspective. While Ferenczi’s theory was rejected by
Freud when it was first presented in 1933, his idea of the child’s identification
with the aggressor has since become standard in relational and interpersonal psychologists’ theories of childhood abuse. See, for example, Bokanowski, Davies,
Herman, and Price.
Ferenczi also emphasized in his Clinical Diary that an essential aspect of
the devastation of childhood trauma lies in the child’s sense of abandonment and
her or his loss of trust in the benignity and nurturing qualities of the environment.
His initial insights have been further developed by scholars of the last fifteen years,
perhaps most notably in Judith Herman’s well-known Trauma and Recovery.
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9. The work of Ferenczi, especially his research into childhood trauma and
his exploration of transference and countertransference, has attracted increased
attention in the last ten years. For Peter Rudnytsky, Ferenczi “incarnates an authentic psychoanalytic identity while being free of Freud’s authoritarian impulses” (217). His work, he contends, allows a shift from Freud’s one-person model
of psychoanalysis, which focuses on an individual’s intrapsychic processes, to a
two-person model, with its emphasis on the interpersonal relationship between
therapist and patient and the belief that an understanding of reality is created
through a shared interaction with another or others (207). Similarly, Ferenczi scholar André Haynal argues that “Ferenczi laid the foundations for a new
conception of analysis, thereby de facto becoming the originator of post-Freudian and postmodern psychoanalysis—that of Balint, Winnicott, Bion, Kohut,
Thompson, and even Lacan and others” (317).
10. Freud warned Ferenczi against playing “the tender mother role with others” (Correspondence 423). Other analysts, however, have given a more sympathetic appraisal of Ferenczi’s attempts at mutual analysis with his patients, arguing that it showed an attempt, albeit flawed, to create a shared mutuality in his
relationship with his analysands. See, for example, Aron, Bokanowski, Brenner,
Frankel, Haynal, Ragen and Aron, and Rudnytsky.
11. Cf. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch’s contrast between Ferenczi and Otto
Rank, on the one hand, and Freud, on the other. Similarly, Haynal, in his comparison of Freud and Ferenczi, argues that Ferenczi “shifted the focus of psychoanalysis from reconstruction and intellectual understanding of the past to
an interpersonal experience centering on what is repeated and remembered”
(327).
12.In his work Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, Leonard Shengold first popularized the term “soul murder” to refer to the
psychological devastation caused by physical and sexual childhood abuse. For
Shengold, soul murder refers to the destruction of children’s capacity to love and
trust, to find pleasure and joy in their world, and to lay claim to and interpret
their experiences.
13. For an opposing interpretation of the novel, see Howells’s claim that
Mala’s “communion with nature” allows her to “divest . . . herself of the limits
of individual identity [and so] find . . . release from traumatic memory” (156), or
May’s contention that “Mala refuses to have her garden or her person be defined
as signifying only violation, pity, or madness. . . . Thus, as a walled space in
the center of Paradise, Mala’s garden can be understood to be . . . a . . . subversive method of politicized resistance” (104). While May, in particular, does well
to remind readers of Mala’s capacity to survive and endure, and to insist that
they recognize her strength, both interpretations ascribe to Mala an agency and
choice that she does not possess. By foregrounding ways in which they feel Mala
is able to resist both personal and political forms of violation, they disallow
the novel’s most disturbing element—its exploration of the complete powerlessness and paralysis, as well as the violation of bodily and psychic integrity, that
scholars place at the core of traumatic experience. Mala, like the incest survivors
discussed by Nachmani, is left with “no credible text, no witnesses, no capacity
to bear witness” (204).
14. Cf. May’s final claim that “Mootoo uses Mala’s philosophy of nature to
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further her vision of a radicalized, egalitarian form of love . . . rather than [an
understanding of love] as a means of possession, objectification, or domination”
(118).
15.In what is considered a standard discussion of the way in which traumatic experience seems to exist outside the passage of time, endlessly repeating
itself in an eternal present, Bessel van der Kolk explains that “mental representation of the experience is probably laid down by means of a system that records
affective experience but has no capacity for symbolic processing or placement in
space and time” (“Body” 48). Because the memories are not localized in “time
and space, these [memory] fragments continue to lead an isolated existence . . .
timeless and ego-alien” (van der Kolk, “Trauma and Memory” 295).
16.In his explanation of playing, creativity, and potential space in Playing
and Reality, D. W. Winnicott emphasizes the importance of maintaining a separation and yet an interaction between one’s inner world and exterior reality—it
is by maintaining the tension and interplay between the two that individuals lay
claim to their experiences and live creatively, both discovering and interpreting
their external reality.
17. For a different interpretation of Tyler, one that downplays his relationship with Mala in order to focus more exclusively on his gender and sexuality,
see Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian
Public Cultures.
18. LaCapra uses the phrase “facile narrative of redemption” a number of
times to underline the dangers of “spiritually uplifting accounts of extreme events
from which we attempt to derive reassurance or a benefit (for example, unearned
confidence about the ability of the human spirit to endure any adversity with
dignity and nobility)” (42). Similar points about the potentially exploitative or
totalizing nature of the appropriation of the victim’s experience are made in Simon et al.’s Between Hope and Despair.
19.In his extended critical analysis of the dangers of an excessive identification with the victim, LaCapra notes that such an identification may be self-serving
or exploitative of another’s pain; it may lead to an “unqualified objectification,
formal analysis, or harmonizing, indeed redemptive narrative through which one
derives from the suffering of others something career-enhancing, ‘spiritually’ uplifting, or identity-forming for oneself or one’s group” (98–99).
20.In her study of the literary representation of trauma, Laurie Vickroy provides a detailed picture of the narrative style that she considers characteristic of
trauma narratives. She contends that the structure of trauma narratives attempts
to mirror the fragmented way the experience is processed in the brain (3–25)
and points out that most try to unsettle the reader, rather than allowing an easy
empathy or sympathy with the victim (26). Her work echoes the approach of
writers such as LaCapra, who similarly suggests that trauma narratives should
adopt a particular style, one that eschews easy closures and uses fragmentation
and destabilization to avoid “extreme objectification and harmonizing narratives” (103).
21.Adopting a style that subjects readers to a “secondary trauma” (102)
aids in empathic unsettlement, contends LaCapra, in that it comes “as close as
possible to the experience of traumatized victims without presuming to be identical to it” (106).
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N otes on C ontributors
S arah A ppleton is a professor at Murray State University, author of
The Bitch is Back: Wicked Women in Literature, and coeditor of He
Said, She Says: An RSVP to the Male Text. She has published numerous essays in such journals as African American Review and The Journal of Contemporary Thought.
S usan B erry B rill de R amírez , professor of English at Bradley University, teaches Native American, women’s, and environmental literatures and literary theory. Author of Wittgenstein and Critical Theory
(1995), Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (1999), and Native American Life-History Narratives: Colonial
and Postcolonial Navajo Ethnography (2007), she is currently completing a volume on Native American women’s ethnography and an
edited volume about the Native writer Simon J. Ortiz.
S ally C hivers is an assistant professor of Canadian studies and Eng-
lish at Trent University and the author of From Old Woman to Older
Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives (Columbus:
The Ohio State University Press, 2003). Her current research focuses
on Canadian disability studies.
E arl G. I ngersoll is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor of English
at the State University of New York at Brockport. He is the editor
or author of a dozen books, most recently Waltzing Again: New and
Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood.
299
300
Notes on Contributors
P hyllis S ternberg P errakis has taught for many years in the English
Department of the University of Ottawa. She is the editor of Spiritual
Explorations in the Works of Doris Lessing (1999) and a number of
articles on Doris Lessing and other writers. She is coeditor of Doris
Lessing Studies.
D ebrah R aschke is professor of English at Southeast Missouri State
University and author of Modernism, Metaphysics, and Sexuality
(Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2006). She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary literature and
is a past president of the Doris Lessing Society.
R oberta R ubenstein is professor of literature at American Univer-
sity, where she teaches women’s fiction and feminist theory. She is the
author of The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms
of Consciousness (1979); Boundaries of the Self: Gender, Culture, Fiction (1987); Home Matters: Longing and Belonging, Nostalgia and
Mourning in Women’s Fiction (2001); and more than thirty essays on
women writers.
S andra S inger , coeditor of Doris Lessing Studies, has written criti-
cism, papers, and her Ph.D. dissertation (“Doris Lessing’s Fiction and
Contemporary Cultural Theorists”) on wide-ranging topics concerning
Lessing’s oeuvre. Her contribution here concerns another living author,
Rebecca Wells, in relationship to trauma studies, which she teaches at
the University of Guelph, Canada.
V irginia T iger , professor and chair of English at Rutgers University­–
Newark, is the author of four books, the most recent being The
Unmoved Target: The Fiction of William Golding. She has published
scholarly articles in such journals as Contemporary Literature, Modern
Fiction Studies, Doris Lessing Studies, and Style and is the cofounder
and an executive officer of the Doris Lessing Society, an Allied Organization of the MLA.
K athryn V an S panckeren , professor of English and writing at the
University of Tampa, writes poetry and essays on contemporary literature. A past president and founding newsletter editor of the Atwood
Society, she has published numerous articles on Atwood and coedited Margaret Atwood: Vision and Forms (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Notes on Contributors
301
Illinois University Press, 1988). An updated, revised edition of her
concise Outline History of American Literature, available on the Web,
is forthcoming.
J eanie E. W arnock teaches in the English department of the Uni-
versity of Ottawa and is a coeditor of Doris Lessing Studies. She has
published on Lessing and is currently researching trauma narratives
and psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi. She is also helping develop the
memoirs of a Sudanese political prisoner for publication.
S haron R. W ilson is professor of English and women’s studies at
University of Northern Colorado and teaches contemporary literature
and World Literature By and About Women. She has published articles
on Doris Lessing and other contemporary writers and articles and
books on Margaret Atwood, including Margaret Atwood’s Fairy-Tale
Sexual Politics.
I ndex
Abel, Elizabeth, Mariane Hirsch,
and Elizabeth Langland: The
Voyage In: Fictions of Female
Development, 21n7
abuse, child: in Divine Secrets,
217–18, 235; in Little Altars,
228–29, 232–35, 239; physical,
in Divine Secrets, 219; in Little
Altars, 228, 233; sexual, in Little
Altars, 228, 232–33. See also
Felman, Shoshana; incestuous
abuse; trauma
Addas, Claude: Quest for the Red
Sulphur: The Life of Ibn ‘Arabi,
77n13
Aeneid (Virgil), 163
Aged by Culture (Gullette), 10,
22n12
aging, 126, 135; in Atwood’s poems,155; in The Blind Assassin,
107, 108, 109–10, 111, 121; cultural scripts of, 3, 8, 11, 17; and
hormonal shifts in women, 156;
in Morning in the Burned House,
160–62, 170; social scripts of, 3
Aging and Gender in Literature:
Studies in Creativity (WyattBrown and Rossen), 13, 76n2
alchemy: in Morning in the Burned
House, 155–56, 166, 169, 172–
73; as metaphor, 155–56; 168;
as narrative pattern in Apuleius’
The Golden Ass, 166–68; parallel with Eleusinian mysteries,
157–58; in vision of Aphrodite,
155. See also space crone
Alex (The Blind Assassin), 128,
133–34, 136, 148n10
Amazons, 84
Amor and Psyche (Neumann), 157
Anglican Church, 243–45
Aphrodite, 155–56, 161, 164–65,
168, 174–75, 178n2
Appleton, Sarah. See Raschke,
Debrah, and
Apuleius, Lucius, 157, 167–68,
178n5
Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures,
An (Cvetkovich), 295n17
Aron, Lewis, 294n10
Arthurian legends, 128
As We Are Now (Sarton), 27
Athena, 177
atonement (The Blind Assassin),
107, 121
Atonement (McEwan), 106, 113,
118, 120, 122n6
attachment (Memoirs of a Survivor),
57–60, 62. See also detachment
303
304
Atwood, Margaret, 1, 13, 14, 16,
17, 83, 85, 86, 87–94, 97, 99,
105–77; and aging, 158; as a
model for older women, 156;
uncanny women in, 153–54;
mythological sketches by,
173–77. See also oral tradition;
Atwood, Margaret, works of;
and specific titles
Atwood, Margaret, works of: Alias
Grace, 92, 112–13, 122n1,
153; “The Angel of Bad Judgment,” 92; The Blind Assassin,
3, 6, 9, 15, 16, 83, 87, 88, 90,
92–94, 99, 103–25, 154; Bodily
Harm, 87; Cat’s Eye, 88, 90,
92, 115–16, 126, 128–29, 153,
162, 169; “The Curse of Eve,”
87; “Death by Landscape,” 127,
148n2; The Edible Woman,
87, 90; “Gathering” (Atwood
Papers), 160–61; “Girl Without
Hands,” 169–70; Good Bones
and Simple Murders, 89, 173,
175; The Handmaid’s Tale, 90,
112, 115, 117; “Helen of Troy
Does Counter Dancing,” 162–64;
Interlunar, 154; Lady Oracle,
87, 88; Life Before Man, 88, 90;
“The Loneliness of the Military
Historian,” 158, 165; Murder in
the Dark, 154, 173; Negotiating
with the Dead, 108–9, 122n10,
155; New Poems, 89; “The Ottawa River by Night,” 166–67;
172; Once in August, 87; Oryx
and Crake, 90–92, 123n24,
124n25; The Penelopiad: The
Myth of Penelope and Odysseus, 91, 123n19; The Robber
Bride, 6, 9, 16, 88, 153; 178n7;
Selected Poems II, 89, 154; “The
Signer,” 170; Surfacing, 87, 155;
Survival: A Thematic Guide to
the Canadian Literature, 84, 88,
97, 146, 150n25, 155; “Up,”
169; “Valediction: Intergalactic,”
154; “Vermillion Flycatchers, San
Index
Pedro, Arizona,” 169; You Are
Happy, 93. See also Morning in
the Burned House; and specific
titles
Austen, Jane: Sense and Sensibility,
32
autobiography, 266n2; autobiographical fictions, 63; autobiographical Memoirs, 75; ethnographic, 243, 247–51, 266n2;
and Lessing, 48–55. See also
spiritual journey
Auto da Fay (Weldon), 198n6
Bahá’í Faith, 48, 243–45, 246, 263
Bahá’u’lláh, 48, 52, 53, 56, 76n5,
78n23; The Hidden Words of
Bahá’u’lláh, 78n25; The Kitáb-iIqán: The Book of Certitude, 52,
56; The Seven Valleys and The
Four Valleys, 78n23
Bakhtiar, Leah: Sufi Expressions of
the Mystic Quest, 78n24, 78n25
Balint, Michael, 284, 294n9
Barker, Pat: The Century’s Daughter,
27; Union Street, 27
Barnes, Hazel, 85
Barthes, Roland, 107, 122n3; S/Z,
122n3
Baudrillard, Jean, 154
Beauvoir, Simone de: The Second
Sex, 198n4
Before Breakfast (O’Neill), 85
Beloved (Morrison), 86
Benjamin, Jessica, 285
Beran, Carol, 155
Between East and West: Sufism
in the Novels of Doris Lessing
(Galin), 48
Between Hope and Despair (Simon,
Rosenberg, and Eppert), 293n7,
295n18
Between the Acts (Woolf), 122n9
Bible: Old Testament, 244
Bigsby, Christopher: “Interview with
Doris Lessing,” 77n3
Black Madonna, 90
Blind Assassin, The (Atwood), 126,
Index
127, 128–36; doubling, 133–34;
goodness, 134; spirituality, 135,
136; victim, 135
characters in: Alex Thomas,
106, 116, 119; Calista
Fitzsimmons, 116; Iris
Chase Griffen, 105, 106,
107, 108, 109, 110, 111,
112, 113, 114, 115, 116,
117, 118, 119, 120, 121;
Laura Chase, 106, 110,
114, 116, 117, 118, 119;
Reenie, 114, 120; Richard
Griffen, 114, 116, 117; Sabrina, 113, 121; Winifred,
114, 115
“Bloody Chamber, The” (Carter),
83
Bluebeard, 83, 92; Perrault, 92
Bly, Robert, 85
“Body, Memory, and the Psychobiology of Trauma, The” (van der
Kolk), 295n15
Body Works: Objects of Desire in
Modern Narrative (Brooks),
122n7
Bogan, Louise: “Medusa,” 86
Bokanowski, Thierry, 293n8,
294n10
Bolen, Jean Shinoda, 155–59, 162,
164, 166, 175, 178n3; Goddesses
in Everywoman, 158
Brenner, Ira, 294n10
Brief History of Everything, A (Wilber), 2, 3, 11, 21n1, 21n2, 21n4,
21n8, 77n14
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
(Lessing), 32, 76n1
Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry, 2, 4,
13, 18–19, 241–69; Contemporary American Indian Literatures
and the Oral Tradition, 243,
247, 252; Native-American
Life-History Narratives, 266n3,
266n4
Brooks, Cleanth, 123n24; The WellWrought Urn, 123n24
Brooks, Peter, 106, 107, 110,
305
122n2, 122n7; Body Works:
Objects of Desire in Modern
Narrative, 122n7; Reading for
the Plot: Design and Intention in
Narrative, 122n2
Bryson, John, 87
Bull, Gerald, 146, 150
Butler, Robert N., 9, 12; life review,
9, 19
“Byzantium” (Yeats), 110, 120,
123n13
Cambridge Companion to Jung, The
(Young-Eisendrath and Dawson),
55
Campbell, Joseph, 155
“Canonization, The” (Donne), 120,
123n24
Caribbean writers, 270–71; garden
symbolism of, 270–71, 294n13
Carter, Angela: “The Bloody Chamber,” 83
Caruth, Cathy, 219–20, 238–39;
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History, 293n6
Casteel, Sarah, 292n1
Cat’s Eye (Atwood), 126, 128–29
Century’s Daughter, The (Barker),
27
Cereus Blooms at Night (Mootoo),
4, 6, 11, 19; narrative structure
of, 274, 278–80, 282–85; postcolonial approaches to, 270–71,
292n2, 294n13; role of frame
narrator, 278–80, 286–88, 290;
treatment of traumatic repetition,
288–90. See also Mootoo, Shani
“The Changing Face of Fiction”
(Weldon), 196, 198n6
Charis (The Robber Bride), 133,
135, 136–47, 148n1, 149n14
Chase, Laura (The Blind Assassin),
128, 129, 130, 131–35, 136,
148nn9–12
Chaucer, Geoffrey: The Canterbury
Tales, Wife of Bath, 85
child (children): divine female child
as image of identity of older
306
woman, 156–57, 167–68, 172;
image of burning, 172; in Morning in the Burned House, 160,
166, 170, 172, 177. See also
alchemy
childbearing (and hormones), 156
Chittick, William: The Self-disclosure of God, 77n13, 79n28; The
Sufi Path of Knowledge, 79n35
Chivers, Sally, 14, 17–18, 200–215;
From Old Woman to Older
Women: Contemporary Culture
and Women’s Narratives, 13–14
Chodorow, Nancy: The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender,
21n7
Christian missionization, 243,
265n1
Circe, 154
“Circus Animals’ Desertion, The”
(Yeats), 107, 122n5
Cixous, Hélène, 87, 111; “The
Laugh of the Medusa,” 111
Cleft, The (Lessing), 14
Clement, Catherine, 87
Clifford, James, 255, 266n2, 267n6
Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi,
The (Ferenczi), 273, 281, 293n8
coding, protective, 255
“coercive patterns” (Shah), 56
Cohen, Richard: Face to Face with
Levinas, 51
Coldridge, Lynda (Shikasta), 74,
80n42
colonialism: consequences of, 271,
292n2; healing from, 271
colonial missionization, 244, 245,
258
colonization, 241, 243, 247, 251,
257–58, 259, 265n1
Coming to Age (Rege and Saxton),
22n10
Conde, Maryse, 83, 86; Tituba (I,
Tituba), 83; Mama Yaya, 85
Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition
(Brill de Ramírez), 243, 247, 252
Index
conversive: defined, 248; interpretation, 249, 250, 262; listeningreading, 248, 250, 253, 264;
storytelling, 248, 249, 250,
252, 257, 262, 264; techniques,
248–50, 253
Corbin, Henry: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi,
52, 77n9
Cordelia (Cat’s Eye), 128–29
Correspondence of Sigmund Freud
and Sándor Ferenczi, The,
(Freud) 294n10
creation myth in ancient Greece,
157, 171, 176–77, 178n4;
Orphic version of, 157, 166–67,
171
Creative Imagination in the Sufism
of Ibn ‘Arabi (Corbin), 52, 77n9
Cree, 244
crone, 83–85, 100; in Atwood, 86,
87, 90–94, 153–54; hormonal
shifts in 156; in Hulme, 97–99;
in Lessing, 94–97; Morning in
the Burned House, 159–60; wisdom, 87, 92, 98, 99. See also old
woman; “Space Crone”
Cruikshank, Julie, 241–42, 246,
248–51, 256, 257, 261, 264,
265, 266n3, 267n5; Social Life
of Stories, 245, 250, 259, 263.
See also Life Lived Like a Story
Cvetkovich, Ann: An Archive of
Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and
Lesbian Public Cultures, 295n17
“Daddy” (Plath), 162
Danesh, H. B.: The Psychology of
Spirituality, 76n7
Davey, Frank, 85
Davies, Jody, 293n8
“Death by Landscape” (Atwood),
127, 148n2
death drive, 293n6
Death in Venice (Mann), 30
death of the father: in Atwood’s
oeuvre, 155; as death of patriarchy, 159; elegy for, 159; in
Index
Morning in the Burned House,
158–59, 166–68, 170, 172
“Defence of Guenevere” (Morris),
128
Deloria, Vine, Jr., 243, 247, 264
Demeter, 156–57. See also Eleusinian Mysteries
Derrida, Jacques: “Structure, Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences,” 78n26
detachment: and attachment, 57–60;
in Bahá’u’lláh’s writings, 76n5;
in Memoirs of a Survivor, 51–53,
55, 56, 62; in Shikasta, 62 63,
66, 67, 69, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76,
79n35
dialectic of opposites: in Memoirs
of a Survivor, 56, 57–60, 61;
in Shikasta, 61–74. See also
detachment; narratives; spiritual
journey
Diana, 83
Diaries of Jane Somers, The (Lessing), 22n11, 27, 88
Dido, 135
dimensions of spirit: ascending, 11;
descending, 11. See also Wilber,
Ken
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (film), 216–17, 226, 228,
237, 239
Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (Wells), 4, 6, 14, 18,
216–29, 235–40
Donne, John: “The Canonization,”
120, 123n24
“Doris Lessing’s Prophetic Voice in
Shikasta: Cassandra or Sibyl?”
(Webber), 80n41
Doris Lessing: The Poetics of
Change (Greene), 69, 79n35,
80n37, 80n41
doubling, 133–34
Down among the Women (Weldon),
195, 199n9
Drabble, Margaret: The Peppered
Moth, 27; The Witch of Exmoor,
27. See also The Seven Sisters
307
dramatic monologue: Morning in
the Burned House (Atwood),
155, 158–59 162, 165
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson),
122n10, 123n22
Dropped Threads: What We Aren’t
Told (Shields), 228, 240
Dropped Threads 2: More of What
We Aren’t Told (Shields), 228,
240
East of Eden (Steinbeck), 85
Ecclesiastes, 197n1
ego (Memoirs of a Survivor), 49,
50, 52; alter ego, 49, 60, 75;
conscious ego, 55; lower ego, 71;
negative ego, 69, 71
Eleusinian Mysteries, 157, 167–68,
172. See also Euridice; Inanna;
Kore; Persephone; Psyche
Eliot, T. S.: “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 108
Emily (Memoirs of a Survivor), 54,
55, 58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 69, 73,
77n17, 78n21
empathic unsettlement, 271,
286, 293n4, 295n21. See also
LaCapra, Dominick; trauma
narratives
empathy, 278, 279, 286, 288,
295n20. See also empathic unsettlement
envy (Robber Bride), 136–40, 144,
149nn20–21, 150nn26–27
Eros, 157–58, 167,171
Eros and Psyche myth, 157–58,
171, 178n3; in Apuleius and
later writers, 157–58; four major
phases of, 158; phase I—Sorting of Seeds, 158–61; phase
II—Gathering of Golden Fleece,
158, 161–64; phase III—Filling
of Crystal Flask, 158, 164–65;
phase IV—Descent into Underworld, 158, 165–67; Phase
V—Alchemical Power, 167–68;
reveals ascent to heavens and
birth of divine female child,
308
167–68; rite of Isis initiation
concludes Apuleius’ novel, 168;
as a tale within a tale, told by a
crone to comfort a kidnapped
girl, 167–68
Essential Mystics: The Souls’ Journey into Truth, The (Harvey), 52
ethics, 242, 245
ethnography, 247–51, 257; collaborative, 266n2, 266n3, 266–67n5
Eurydice, 157. See also female descent narrative
Eve, 84, 163
extinction (of species), 164
“face of the other,” 275, 276. See
also Levinas, Emmanuel
Face to Face with Levinas (Cohen),
51
Fahim, Shadia, 77n11, 77n15,
78n18, 78n19, 78n22, 78n24,
78n25, 78n27, 79n35, 80n37,
80n40, 80n41, 80n42
fairy tale motifs (Rhode Island
Blues), 183, 189, 190, 192, 193,
194, 197, 198n7; castle, 187;
fairy godmother, 189, 194; happily-ever-after, 197; prince, 183,
197; princess, 183, 197; Sleeping Beauty, 189; Snow White,
185–86; wicked stepmother,
183, 184, 187, 189, 194; wicked
witch, 197
Fee, Margery, 87, 100n1
Felman, Shoshana, 238–39; and
Dori Laub, 239, 280, 284,
293nn5–6; Testimony: Crises of
Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, 293n5
female aging (Rhode Island Blues),
184, 191, 192–93, 194, 197,
198n4, 198n8
female condition (Rhode Island
Blues), 195–96
female descent narrative: analogous
to depression, 156; in Atwood’s
oeuvre, 154–55; in Morning in
the Burned House, 158–73; in
Index
myth including Eleusinian Mysteries, 156–58. See also Inanna
Female Friends (Weldon), 199n9
“female tradition of marginality”:
Fraser, 173
feminist (The Bone People), 98
Femmes Fatales, 85
Ferenczi, Sándor, 273, 281, 284,
293n8, 294nn9–11; The Clinical Diary of Sándor Ferenczi,
273, 281, 293n8; “Confusion
of Tongues Between Adults and
Children,” 293n8; on psychic
fragmentation, 281; role of
therapist in cases of childhood
abuse trauma, 273, 284; twoperson model of psychoanalysis,
294nn9–10
Ferre, Rosario, 83, 97; “The Youngest Doll,” 83
Fifth Child, The (Lessing), 88
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generation (Woodward), 10
First Nations: sacred traditions,
243–47
Fishburn, Katherine, 94
Fisher, Helen, 156
Fiske, John, 227, 239
Fitzgerald, F. Scott: The Great
Gatsby, 130
Foley, John Miles, 252
Forgetting Futures: On Memory,
Trauma, and Identity (Ramadanovic), 293n6
Four-Gated City, The (Lessing), 87
Fowler, James W.: Stages of Faith:
The Psychology of Human
Development and the Quest for
Meaning, 20n1
Frager, Robert, 50, 52, 54, 62, 69,
76–77n8, 77n12, 77n16; soul,
animal, 54; soul, personal, 69;
soul, seven facets of, 52
Frankel, Jay, 294n10
Frankenstein (Shelley), 91
Fraser, Kathleen, 173
Frawley-O’Dea, Mary Gail, 271
Freedman, Diane, Olivia Frey, and
Index
Frances Murphy Zauhar: The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism, 22n13
French, Marilyn, 199n8
Freud, Sigmund, 84, 107, 122n4,
273, 293n6; 293nn8–11; The
Correspondence of Sigmund
Freud and Sándor Ferenczi,
294n10
Freudian psychoanalysis, 294n9,
294n11
Friedrich, Paul, 155
Friendly, Penelope: Moon Tiger, 27
From the Hearth to the Open Road:
A Feminist Study of Aging in
Contemporary Literature (Waxman), 9, 12, 21n7
From Old Woman to Older Women:
Contemporary Culture and
Women’s Narratives (Chivers),
13–14
Galin, Muge: Between East and
West: Sufism in the Novels of
Doris Lessing, 48
garden (multilayered) (Memoirs of
a Survivor), 51, 57–58, 77n11,
78n24
Gartner, Richard: Memories of
Sexual Betrayal: Truth, Fantasy,
Repression, and Dissociation,
293n5
“Gathering” (Atwood), 160–61
Gatsby, Jay, 130
George, Saint, 84
Gessel, Paul, 292n3
Giampieri-Deutsch, Patrizia, 294n11
Gilligan, Carol, 2; In a Different
Voice: Psychological Theory and
Women’s Development, 21n7
“Girl Without Hands” (Atwood),
169–70
globalism, 243–46, 263–64
God of Small Things, The (Roy),
271
Goddess, Great, 83–84, 86, 87, 88,
89, 92, 94, 96, 97; triple, 84,154,
157; triple, and imagery suggest-
309
ing three fates, 170; snake, 84,
89
Goddesses in Everywoman (Bolen),
158
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: Italian Journey, 39
Golden Notebook, The (Lessing),
12, 31, 88
Good Bones (Atwood), 154, 173;
“Cold Blooded,” 154; “Homecoming,” 154; “My Life as a
Bat,” 154
Gorgon, 84; touch, 85
Graves, Robert, 85, 86, 87, 157
Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 130
characters in: Nick Carraway,
130
Greene, Gayle: Doris Lessing: The
Poetics of Change, 69, 79n35,
80n37, 80n41
Griffen, Iris Chase (The Blind Assassin), 126, 127, 128–36, 148nn5–
7, 148nn9–12, 153, 154
Griffen, Richard (The Blind Assassin), 128, 136, 148n8
Grimms’ fairy tales: “Fitcher’s
Bird,” 92, 94; “The Girl Without
Hands,” 94; “Rapunzel,” 97; Rapunzel archetype, 97; “The Robber Bridegroom,” 92–93; “Snow
White,” 84; “Sleeping Beauty”
(“Brier Wood”), 64
Guinevere, 128
Gulf War (Robber Bride), 146, 147,
150n27
Gullette, Margaret Morganroth,
12, 198n8; Aged by Culture,
10, 22n12; Safe at Last in the
Middle Years: The Invention of
the Midlife Progress Novel; Saul
Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne
Tyler, and John Updike, 12
Gutmann, David: Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later
Life, 10
Habermas, Jürgen, 237, 239
Hades, 167–68, 157
310
Hamilton, Edith, 96
Handmaid’s Tale, The (Atwood),
129
Harrison, 84
Hart, David L., 23
Harvey, Andrew: The Essential
Mystics: The Souls’ Journey into
Truth, 52
Hayden, Robert, 85
Haynal, André, 294n9, 294nn10–11
Hecate, 83–85, 86, 89, 96, 97, 168,
178n3. See also witch
Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 123n14
“He Hoa” (Hulme), 87, 100n1
Heilbrun, Carolyn, 199n8; The Last
Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty, 1
“Helen of Troy Does Counter Dancing” (Atwood), 162–64
“Hen Brooding on Cosmic Egg”
(Atwood sketch), 175
Henke, Suzette A., 219–20, 240;
Shattered Subjects: Trauma and
Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, 293n5
Herman, Judith, 293n5, 293n8;
Trauma and Recovery, 293n5,
293n8
Hesiod: Theogony, 96
hieros gamos, 167
Holmes, James R., 253
Homer: Iliad, 163; Odyssey, 163
Hoving, Isabel, 271, 292n1
Howells, Coral Ann, 270, 271,
292n1, 294n13
Hughes, Langston, 33
Hugo (Memoirs of a Survivor), 54,
59, 60, 77n15. See also Emily
Hulme, Keri, 13, 15, 86, 87, 91; The
Bone People, 15, 87, 88, 96–100;
“He Hoa,” 87, 100n1
hybrid, 154
hybridity (Cereus Blooms at Night),
270
“Hymn to Demeter,” 157
hyperreal, 154
Ibn ‘Arabi, 52, 60, 77n9, 77n13,
79n28. See also Khidr
Index
Ibsen, Henrik, 123n14; Hedda Gabler, 123n14
I Ching, 97, 184, 185
identification with aggressor, 273,
281, 293n8
Idylls of the King (Tennyson), 127,
128
Iliad (Homer), 163
imperialism, 252, 266n5
In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women’s Development (Gilligan), 21n7
Inanna, 156. See also female descent
narrative
incest. See incestuous abuse
incestuous abuse: causes of, 272–73;
in Cereus Blooms at Night,
270–71, 273–74, 275–76,
280–84; healing from, 271–74,
280, 282–85; loss of imagination, 280; psychological damage
of, 272–73, 275–76, 281–82,
293n8, 294n12–13; relational
psychoanalysis’ understanding
of, 272–74; silence around, 271,
292n3; silencing of victim, 272–
73, 280–82; spiritual damage
done by, 271, 273, 274, 275–76,
281–82. See also Ferenczi, Sándor; trauma
inclusiveness: religious, 244–45,
247, 264; storytelling, 258
Indian boarding schools. See residential schools
Ingersoll, Earl G., 3, 9, 16, 105–25
Integral Psychology: Consciousness,
Spirit, Psychology, Therapy (Wilber), 3, 4, 5, 21n2, 21n3
Internet: and chat rooms for Rebecca Wells’s fans, 216, 225–27,
238; implications of, 240; Ya-Ya
site, 216–18, 225–27, 238;
interpersonal psychoanalysis,
294nn8–9, 294n11
intersubjectivity, 285
intertexts, 88, 97, 100
intertextual pattern, 161
The Intimate Critique: Auto-
Index
biographical Literary Criticism
(Freedman, Frey, and Zauhar),
22n13
“Invention of the Alphabet, The”
(Atwood sketch), 175
Irigaray, Luce, 277, 279, 285
Ironist’s Cage: Memory, Trauma,
and the Construction of History,
The (Roth), 293n7
Ishtar, 157
Isis, 86, 94, 157, 168, 178n2. See
also Goddess, Great; Eleusinian
mysteries
Italian Journey (Goethe), 39
Johor (Shikasta), 62–67, 68, 69, 71,
73, 75, 79n29, 79n34, 79n35,
80n38. See also Sherban, George;
spiritual journey
Jung, Carl (Jungian), 10, 21n6, 48,
49, 50, 52, 54, 55, 76n3, 184,
185, 186, 197n2, 198n5; animus,
186, 198n5; collective shadow,
55, 58, 59; Self, 50, 52, 54,
77n10; shadow, 55, 59, 77n6;
synchronicity, 185, 197n2
Keats, John, 123n24; “La Belle
Dame Sans Merci,” 85; “Lamia,”
84, 85; “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”
123n24
Keedwell, Mark, 76n4
Khidr, 52, 53, 77n9, 77n13. See also
Sufi; spiritual guide
King Arthur, 128, 131
Klondike gold rush, 241, 243, 250,
259
Knowledge: spiritual, 243
Koran, 50, 52; eighteenth Sura, 52
Kore, 157. See also Persephone;
Goddess, Great: triple; female
descent narrative
“La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Keats), 85
Lacan, Jacques, 137, 147, 150n29,
294n9
LaCapra, Dominick, 65, 79n33,
311
238, 240, 271; 285–86, 288,
289, 293n4, 293n7, 295nn18–
21; empathetic unsettlement, 66;
Writing History, Writing Trauma,
293n4, 293n7
“Lady Lazarus” (Plath), 163
“Lady of Shallot” (Tennyson), 128
Laguna Pueblo, 241
Laing, R. D., 220, 225, 240; and A.
Esterson, 238–40
Lakota, 264
“Lamia” (Keats), 84, 85
Lancelot, 128
Language: limitations in conveying
traumatic experience, 272–73
Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond
Sixty, The (Heilbrun), 1
“Laugh of the Medusa, The” (Cixous), 111
Laurence, Margaret, 83, 86; The
Stone Angel, 27, 83, 87
Lawrence, D. H., 122n12; The
Rainbow, 122–23n12; Women in
Love, 123n12
Leach, Maria, and Jerome Fried, 96
Le Guin, Ursula, 153
Lessing, Doris, 1, 13, 14, 15, 17, 20,
47–82, 83, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91,
94, 96, 97, 99, 105, 118, 199n8;
“Address,” 87; Canopus series,
88; “A Conversation with Doris
Lessing,” 61; midlife creativity,
47; “Some Remarks,”47; spiritual maturity, 75–76. See also
specific titles
Levinas, Emmanuel, 51, 59, 274–77,
286; “face of the other,” 275–76;
responsibility for the other,
274–77, 286; Totality and Infinity, 277; understanding of subjectivity, 274–77, 286; “Uniqueness,” 277; “Useless Suffering,”
274–76, 286
Levy, Kathyrn: “The Middle Way,”
8, 44–45
Lewis, C. S.: Till We Have Faces,
157
Leys, Ruth, 293n6
312
life history, 242
Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories
of Three Yukon Native Elders
(Cruikshank), 18, 241–42, 244,
245, 247, 248, 249, 250–51,
252, 256, 258, 259, 261, 263,
264, 265, 266n3, 267n5
listener-readers, 242, 248, 252,
253; relationship with storyteller,
256–57
Little Altars Everywhere (Wells), 18,
216–18, 225, 227–40
“Loneliness of the Military Historian, The” (Atwood), 158, 165
Loreley (Heine), 85
love, again (Lessing) , 3, 7, 15, 27,
28, 29–32, 43, 88; Dido, 29; Durham, Sarah, 27, 28, 29–32, 37,
43, 44; Vairon, Julie, 28, 30, 31
Lowell, Robert, 85
luminous face (Memoirs of a Survivor), 49–52, 53, 58, 60, 62, 66,
77n11. See also spiritual journey;
Survivor
Macbeth (Shakespeare), 84
Machiavelli, 147
madness: in Divine Secrets, 222,
228; and family in Little Altars,
230; in Little Altars, 234. See
also Laing, R. D.: and A. Esterson
magical realism, 88
Mailer, Norman: “The Time of Her
Time,” 85
Mann, Thomas: Death in Venice, 30
Mansfield, Katherine, 227
Margaret Atwood Papers, 92
Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four, and Five The (Lessing), 15,
87, 88, 94–96
Marshall, Paule, 27. See also Praisesong for the Widow
Martha Quest (Lessing), 87, 88
Marvell, Andrew: “To His Coy
Mistress,” 85
May, Vivian, 292nn1–2, 294–
95nn13–14
Index
Mayr, Suzette: The Widows, 11,
17–18
McEwan, Ian, 106, 113, 118,
122n6; Atonement, 106, 113,
118, 120, 122n6
meaning, co-creative, 249, 251,
256–57, 259, 264; episodic, 250,
252, 262; relational, 242, 248,
256–57, 262
Medusa, 83–85, 86, 87, 89, 90, 94,
100; archetype, 85; gaze, 85, 86;
touch, 86
“Medusa” (Bogan), 86
Melville, Herman, 107; Moby-Dick,
107
memoir, 106, 108
Memoirs of a Survivor (Lessing), 3,
5, 12, 15, 27, 47–60, 68, 69, 72,
73, 75, 78n21, 83, 87, 88, 96,
99, 105, 118; archetypal images,
49; archetypal patterns, 55;
archetypal vision, 54; children,
monstrous, 58–60, 63, 78n26;
dreams, 49, 54; memories, 49,
55; metaphor, 48, 51, 56; self,
48–53, 55, 77n14; spiritual vision, 47–48; symbol, 49; 50. See
also Emily; Hugo; spiritual guide;
spiritual journey; Survivor
“Memory and Imagination” (Pye),
293n5
metafiction, 86, 88, 91, 92, 96,
97; apocalyptic, 97; The Bone
People, 98; dystopian, 96; metanarrative, 97
Meyer, Nicholas, 122n4; The SevenPer-Cent Solution, 122n4
“Middle Way, The” (Levy), 8,
44–45
Midsummer Night’s Dream, A
(Shakespeare), 30
mirror: in The Blind Assassin, 9;
in love, again, 7, 29–30, 32;
in Memoirs of a Survivor, 8; in
“The Middle Way,” 44–45; in
Praisesong for the Widow, 7, 33,
35, 36; in Rhode Island Blues, 7,
185–86, 186–87, 198n4; in The
Index
Robber Bride, 9; in The Seven
Sisters, 8, 43; and theories of
aging, 7–9; and transpersonal
development, 8
“mirror stage”: Freud, 186; Lacan,
186; Woodward, 186
“Mirror Stage of Old Age, The”
(Woodward), 7
Mohammed, 52, 53, 77n13
monster, 83–84, 85, 86, 91, 93, 100;
monstrous, 84, 87, 91, 95
Moon Tiger (Friendly), 27
Mootoo, Shani, 270–95; childhood experiences of trauma,
271, 292n3; ethical response
to trauma, 271, 274, 285–87,
290; narrative strategies of,
279–80; 282–83, 285, 288–90;
relationship between self and
other, 277–79, 285–86, 290–92;
treatment of incestuous abuse,
270–71, 273–76, 292n2, 294–
95n14. See also Cereus Blooms
at Night
Morae, 90
Morgan, Emily, 96
Morning in the Burned House (Atwood), 4, 17, 154, 157–59, 160,
162–73; and the Atwood Papers,
160–61, 163–67, 170–71; gender
wars in, 155, 162, 165; images
of outer space at culmination of,
170–72; myth and alchemy in,
155; ordering of poems in, 155,
158, 168, 170, 178n1; personal
experience of death and mourning around the time of writing,
158–59; revision of titles in, 163;
revisions involved in, 155–56,
160–61, 163, 165–67, 170–71,
178n10. See also “Gathering”;
“Girl Without Hands”; “Helen
of Troy Does Counter Dancing”; “The Loneliness of the
Military Historian”; Morning
in the Burned House (Atwood),
contents of ; “The Ottawa River
by Night”; “Shapechangers in
313
Winter”; “The Signer”; “Up”;
“Vermillion Fly Catcher, San
Pedro, Arizona”
Morning in the Burned House (Atwood), contents of: “Asparagus,”
160; “Ava Gardner Reincarnated
as a Magnolia,” 162; “Cell,”
164–65; “Cressida to Troilus: A
Gift,” 162; “Daphne and Laura
and So Forth,” 162; “Down,”
165; “February,” 160; “A Fire
Place,” 170; “Frogless,” 164–65;
“Girl Without Hands,” 169–70;
“Half-Hanged Mary,” 164–65;
“Helen of Troy Does Counter
Dancing,” 162–64; “The Loneliness of the Military Historian,”
158, 165; “Manet’s Olympia,”
162; “Marsh Languages,”
164–65, 170; “Mellower,” 158;
“Miss July Grows Older,” 162;
“The Moment,” 169; “Morning in the Burned House,” 160,
172; “The Ottawa River by
Night,” 166–67, 172; “Owl
Burning,” 165; “A Pink Hotel
in California,” 158, 165; “Red
Fox,” 160; “Romantic,” 164; “A
Sad Child,” 160; “In the Secular
Night,” 160; “Sekhmet, the LionHeaded Goddess of War, Violent
Storms, Pestilence, and Recovery from Illness, Contemplates
the Desert in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art,” 155, 162, 164;
“Shapechangers in Winter,”
170–72; “The Signer,” 170;
“Small Cabin,” 172; “Statuary,”
170; “Two Dreams,” 166; “Two
Dreams, 2,” 166; “Two Fires,”
172; “Up,” 169; “Vermillion
Flycatcher, San Pedro, Arizona,”
169; “Waiting,” 160; “You
Come Back,” 160
Morris, William: “Defence of
Guenevere,” 128
Morrison, Toni, 86, 97; Beloved, 86
Moyn, Samuel, 275
314
Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids
Singing (Sarton), 27, 86
Mujica, Barbara, 123n23
muse, 85, 98; Atwood, 87; Oryx
and Crake, 91; Sarton, 86
“Muse as Medusa, The” (Sarton),
86
mutual analysis, 294n10. See also
Ferenczi, Sándor
mutuality, 274, 277–79, 285,
294n10. See also relational psychoanalysis; Ferenczi, Sándor
myth. See stories, traditional
Nachmani, Gilead, 272, 281,
294n13
naming, 258–62
narrative: of aging, 237, 240; and
detachment vs. attachment in
Memoirs of a Survivor, 57–61; of
Divine Secrets, 218–20, 222; of
Divine Secrets and Little Altars,
227, 237; recovery in Divine
Secrets, 217–18, 220, 225–26,
233, 236
narrative (Shikasta): collective, 62;
inner-space, 67–74; outer-space,
63–67; retrospective, 62. See also
dialectic of opposites; spiritual
journey
narrative structure: associational,
249, 252, 255, 256; episodic,
249, 252, 255, 256, 262
narrator: self-conscious, 87, 88, 92,
95, 97; unreliable, 88
narrator (Shikasta), 47, 48; 67, 75;
inner frame, 62; outer frame, 62.
See also Johor; Sherban, Rachel
Native American. See First Nations
Native-American Life-History Narratives (Brill de Ramírez), 266n3,
266n4
Ned, Annie, 242, 248
Negotiating Identities in Women’s
Lives: English Postcolonial and
Contemporary British Novels
(Sizemore), 13, 22n11
Nemerov, Howard, 85
Index
Neumann, Erich: Amor and Psyche,
157
Newman, Robert D., 96
No Fixed Address: An Amorous
Journey (Van Herk), 17–18
Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing,
The (Rubenstein), 48, 78n18
objectification, 248, 251, 263, 264,
266n5
object relations theory, 272; understanding of incestuous abuse,
272–73
“Ode on a Grecian Urn” (Keats),
123n24
Odyssey (Homer), 163
Okely, Judith, 266n2, 266n5, 267n5
old woman, 153; 155–56; in
Morning in the Burned House,
153–73; as teller of tale of Eros
and Psyche, 167. See also aging;
crone
Olfson, M., 180
Olson, Charles, 173
O’Neill, Eugene: Before Breakfast, 85
Ophelia (Shakespeare), 40
Oppenheimer, Joel, 85
oral tradition as influence on Atwood (Morning in the Burned
House), 154; in curse poems,
162; in motifs, 154; on performative techniques, 159; in
riddle or koan, 169; in motif of
shapechanger, 170; and sound
as transformative, 159, 167; and
tale within a tale, 167–68. See
also dramatic monologue
Orpheus, 157. See also female descent narrative
Otoe-Missouria, 256
Ottawa Citizen, 292n3
“Ottawa River by Night, The”
(Atwood), 166–67, 172
Pandora, 96, 163, 167, 178n3
patriarchy: The Bone People, 84,
96, 98; Cixous, 87; gaze, 90
Pawnee, 256
Index
Peake, Mervin, 97
Peppered Moth, The (Drabble), 27
Perpich, Diane, 275
Perrakis, Phyllis Sternberg, 1–24,
31, 47–82, 96; “Journeys of
the Spirit: The Older Woman in
Doris Lessing’s Work,” 77n17;
“The Marriage of Inner and
Outer Space in Doris Lessing’s
Shikasta, 79n29; “Sufism, Jung
and the Myth of Kore,” 76n3;
77n10; “The Whirlpool and the
Fountain: Inner Growth and
love, again,” 79n31
Persephone, 84, 156–57, 165, 168,
174–75, 178n3; wisdom as
aspect of Persephone and Psyche,
156. See also Kore; female descent narrative
Perseus, 84–85
personae, 155
personal history, 271, 278, 280. See
also trauma narratives
personification of animals, 253–54,
263
Phoenix, 97, 98, 99
Plath, Sylvia, 162–64; “Daddy,”
162; “Lady Lazarus,” 163
Playing and Reality (Winnicott),
295n16
Pleasure (daughter of Eros and
Pysche), 167. See also child
pollution, 164
popular culture (Divine Secrets),
223. See also Fiske, John
postcolonial: Atwood, Hulme, Lessing, 88; Hulme, 97; The Bone
People, 98
postcolonialism: in Caribbean writers, 270
Poster, Mark, 226, 240
postmodern, 154; Atwood, Hulme,
Lessing, 88; critics, 264
potential space, 279–80, 282–83,
285, 292; importance to creativity, 295n16. See also Winnicott,
D. W.; Pye, Evelyn; trauma narratives
315
power (Blind Assassin and The
Robber Bride),128, 134, 136–42,
144–48, 149n21, 150n28
Praisesong for the Widow (Marshall), 7, 15, 22n11, 27, 28, 29,
32–36, 43; Carriacou, 35, 36;
Halsey Street, 33; Ibo(s), 28;
Odysseus, 29
characters in: Avey Johnson,
27, 28, 29, 32–36, 37, 43;
Great-Aunt Cuney, 28,
32, 33, 34, 35, 36; Jerome
Johnson, 33–34
Pratt, Annis, 84–85, 86
Praxis (Weldon), 195, 199n9
Price, Michelle, 293n8
Project Babylon, 150n28
Psyche, 156–59, 161–62, 164–68,
171. See also female descent
narrative
Psychology of Spirituality, The
(Danesh), 76n7
Pye, Evelyn, 280, 293n5; “Memory
and Imagination,” 293n5
Pym, Barbara: Quartet in Autumn,
27
Quartet in Autumn (Pym), 27
quest (Blind Assassin and The Robber Bride), 126, 136
Quest for the Red Sulphur: The Life
of Ibn ‘Arabi (Addas), 77n13
racism: in Divine Secrets, 234; in
Ya-Yas in Bloom, 239
Radner, Joan N., 255
Ragen, Therese, 294n10
Rainbow, The (Lawrence), 122–
23n12
Raine, Kathleen, 85
Ramadanovic, Petar: Forgetting
Futures: On Memory, Trauma,
and Identity, 293n6
Rank, Otto, 294n11
Raschke, Debrah, and Sarah Appleton, 6, 8–9, 16, 126–52, 78n18,
78n24
Reading for the Plot: Design and
316
Intention in Narrative (Brooks),
122n2
reciprocal relationships, 249,
256–57, 259–60, 262, 267n5
Reckoning, The (Sarton), 87
Reclaimed Powers: Men and Women in Later Life (Gutmann), 10
Rege, Josna, 80n41
Rege, Josna, and Ruth Saxton,
22n10
Reifungsroman, 12
Reis, Bruce, 283
relationality, 248, 251, 257
relational psychoanalysis, 272;
mutuality, 273–74, 277, 294n10;
understanding of incestuous
abuse, 272–73, 293n8. See also
Ferenczi, Sándor
religion in Wells’s fiction: African
American, 217, 234; Baptist,
231, 234; Catholic, 217, 224,
231, 234–35; Native American,
217, 223, 236–37
Reproduction of Mothering, The:
Psychoanalysis and the Sociology
of Gender (Chodorow), 21n7
residential schools, 244, 257, 261;
Chootla School, 244
retrospective journey, 1, 3, 4,.6, 9,
10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18, 19; in
midlife women, 11, 12; in older
women as a means of spiritual
growth, 14, 18; retrospective
diary, 5; retrospective narrative,
7, 19; retrospective spiritual
development, 14–20
retrospective narrator (Memoirs of a
Survivor), 47, 48, 53, 54, 77n11,
77n15, 77n16, 78n21, 79n35
revisionist scholars, 266n5
Rhode Island Blues (Weldon), 7, 11,
12, 17, 183–97
characters in: Moore, Felicity,
183–97; Nurse Dawn, 184,
190, 191, 194; Johnson,
William, 185, 186, 187,
190, 191, 192, 193, 194,
195; Joy, 193; Sophia,
Index
187–88, 189, 194, 195,
196
Rilla (Shikasta), 69, 71. See also
Sherban, Rachel
Risley, Elaine (Cat’s Eye), 126, 128
Rooke, Constance, 13, 237, 240
Room of One’s Own, A (Woolf), 27
rooms behind the wall (Memoirs of
a Survivor), 49, 55–57; communal, 49; impersonal, 51, 55–56;
meditative, 51, 54; personal, 51,
56; symbolic, 51
Roth, Michael: The Ironist’s Cage:
Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of History, 293n7
Roy, Arundhati, 271. See also The
God of Small Things
Roz (The Robber Bride), 133, 135,
136–43, 145–47, 148nn1–2,
149n14
Rubenstein, Roberta, 7, 8, 10–11,
12, 17, 94, 122n11, 183–99,
199n8, 199n10. See also The
Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing
Rudnytsky, Peter, 294nn9–10
Rumi, 77n13
Sabrina (The Blind Assassin),
135–36
sacrifice (The Blind Assassin),
116–18, 119
Safe at Last in the Middle Years:
The Invention of the Midlife
Progress Novel: Saul Bellow,
Margaret Drabble, Anne Tyler,
and John Updike (Gullette), 12
Said, Edward W., 263, 264
Saiedi, Nader, 53, 57, 77n5, 78n23
“Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), 108,
122n8
Salman, Sherry, 76n6
Sarton, May, 86. See also Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing; “The Muse as Medusa”; The
Reckoning; As We Are Now
Schwarz, Daniel R., 236, 240
“Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 162
Index
Second Sex, The (Beauvoir), 198n4
Self-disclosure of God, The (Chittick), 77n13, 79n28
Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 32
Serena Joy (The Handmaid’s Tale),
129
Sethe (Morrison), 86
Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The
(Meyer), 122n4
Seven Sisters, The (Drabble), 8, 15,
27, 28, 29, 36–44; destiny, 29,
37, 39, 40, 41; fate, 34, 37, 39,
40, 41; mistletoe, 38
characters in: Mrs. Jerrold,
40; Wilton, Candida, 27,
28, 29, 36–44
mythological references in:
Aeneas, 29; The Aeneid,
29; Carthage, 29, 37, 41;
Golden bough, 38, 39, 41;
mistletoe, 38; Pleiades, 39;
Sibyl (of Cumae), 29
sexuality in older women (Rhode
Island Blues), 184–85, 186,
190–92, 193, 194, 199n8
Shah, Idries, 53, 56, 77n13, 78n20
Shakespeare, William, 117; Dark
Lady, 85, 91; Macbeth, 84, 117;
A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
30; Ophelia, 40
“Shapechangers in Winter” (Atwood), 170–72
Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing
(Henke), 293n5
Shelley, Mary: Frankenstein, 91
Shengold, Leonard, 274, 294n12
Sherban, Benjamin (Shikasta),
71–73
Sherban, George (Shikasta), 66,
67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74,
75–76, 80n38, 80n41; words,
66–67. See also Johor
Sherban, Olga and Simon (Shikasta),
73
Sherban, Rachel (Shikasta), 62, 67;
diary, 68–71, 75–76. See also
Rilla
317
Shields, Carol: Dropped Threads:
What We Aren’t Told, 228, 240;
Dropped Threads 2: More of
What We Aren’t Told, 228, 240
Shikasta (Lessing), 5, 15, 47, 48,
60–74, 75, 76n1, 79n29, 79n30,
79n32, 79n35, 80n38, 80n41;
Canopus, 61, 63, 64; 66–68, 72,
74, 79n30; collective spiritual
adventuring, 60–63; ego, 69, 76;
self, 62, 66, 67, 72–74; service as
a means to spiritual growth, 62,
66–67, 72–75, 77n12; Shammat,
61, 63, 64, 67, 71, 72, 80n38,
80n39. See also Coldridge,
Lynda; Johor; Rilla; Sherban,
Benjamin; Sherban, George; Sherban, Olga and Simon; Sherban,
Rachel; spiritual journey (Memoirs of a Survivor)
Sidney, Angela, 241–65; Anglican
affiliation, 243, 263; death of
siblings, 261; gold rush stories,
250; Haa Shagóon: Our Family History (Sidney), 261; “How
People Got Flint,” 251–56, 257;
identification as a Bahá’í, 243,
245, 246, 263; naming, 258–62;
Place Names of the Tagish
Region, Southern Yukon, 246; recording storytelling, 248; Tagish
Tlaagú: Tagish Stories, 246, 255,
262; traditional tribal stories,
251; trickster Crow stories, 255;
use of conversive strategies, 254;
worldmindedness, 246; Yukon
audience, 258
“Signer, The” (Atwood), 170
Silko, Leslie Marmon, 241–42, 250,
253
Simon, Roger, Sharon Rosenberg,
and Claudia Eppert, 290, 293n7,
295n18. See also Between Hope
and Despair
simulation, 154
Singer, Sandra, 4, 6, 14, 18, 21n4,
216–40
Sizemore, Christine: Negotiating
318
Identities in Women’s Lives: English Postcolonial and Contemporary British Novels, 13, 22n11
“Sleeping Beauty” (“Brier Wood,”
Grimm), 84
Smith, Kitty, 248
snake, biblical, 84. See also Goddess, Great
Social Life of Stories (Cruikshank),
245, 250, 259, 263
Socrates, 241, 266n2
soul murder, 270, 274, 287,
294n12. See also Shengold, Leonard
“Space Crone” (Le Guin), 153;
in Atwood’s oeuvre, 153–55;
Morning in the Burned House,
159, 171; outer space (heavens)
as final abode of Psyche and her
divine child Pleasure, 167
space fiction (Lessing), 76n1; inner-,
47, 61, 76n1; outer-, 47, 61
spiral dynamics, 5, 21n3
spiritual development: of abused
women, 4; of midlife woman,
10; of midlife and older women,
5, 12; of the older woman, 12;
of the older writer, 13; spiral of,
5; theory of, 2–4, 21n4. See also
retrospective journey; Wilber,
Ken
spiritual growth (Rhode Island
Blues), 184, 186, 192–93,
196–97
spiritual guide (Memoirs of a Survivor), 53, 58. See also Khidr;
luminous face
spiritual journey (Memoirs of a
Survivor): of the Survivor, 49–60.
See also retrospective narrator
(Memoirs of a Survivor)
spiritual journey (Shikasta): of Benjamin, 71–72; of Johor, 63–67; of
Coldridge, Lynda, 74; retrospective nature of, 67; of Sherban,
Olga and Simon, 73; of Sherban,
Rachel, 67–71. See also narrative
(Shikasta)
Index
Stages of Faith: The Psychology of
Human Development and the
Quest for Meaning (Fowler),
20n1
Standing Rock Sioux, 243
Stein, Gertrude, 173
Steinbeck, John: East of Eden, 85
Stevenson, Robert Louis, 122n10;
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 122n10,
123n22
Stone Angel, The (Laurence), 27,
83, 87
stories: historical, 250–52; traditional, 242, 245, 249
storytelling, 248; audience, 242,
250; craft of, 249, 250; oral,
242–43, 251, 267n6; silence,
249, 259
“Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences”
(Derrida), 78n26
Sufi(s) (Sufism), 50, 51, 76n5; Lessing
and, 48; orders, 48; self, 50–51
Sufi Path of Knowledge, The (Chittick), 79n35
Summer Before the Dark, The (Lessing), 88
Survival: A Thematic Guide to the
Canadian Literature (Atwood),
146, 150n25
survival: from colonization, 250,
251–52, 259, 263, 265; from
hardships, 243, 251–52
survivance, 241, 263
Survivor (Memoirs of a Survivor),
49–60
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 108, 121;
Idylls of the King, 127, 128;
“Lady of Shallot,” 128; “Ulysses,” 91, 108, 121
testimony: in Divine Secrets, 236; in
Little Altars, 233. See also Felman, Shoshana: and Dori Laub
Testimony: Crises of Witnessing
in Literature, Psychoanalysis,
and History (Felman and Laub),
293n5
Index
Theogony (Hesiod), 96
Tiger, Virginia, 3, 7–8, 10, 15,
27–46
Till We Have Faces (Lewis), 157
“Time of Her Time, The” (Mailer),
85
“To His Coy Mistress” (Marvell),
85
To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies
of Aging (Waxman), 11, 20,
22n9
Tomalin, Claire, 87
Tony (The Robber Bride), 133, 135,
136–47, 148n1, 149n14, 178n7
torch, 163, 172
Totality and Infinity (Levinas), 277
touch, 277–78, 283
“Tower, The” (Yeats), 108, 122n8
“Tradition and the Individual Talent” (Eliot), 108
traditions: indigenous, 244–45, 261.
See also storytelling
trauma: collective trauma, 271;
consequences of, 271, 294n13;
fragmentation from, 283;
healing from, 272–73, 293n6;
individual trauma and personal histories of, 271–73, 280;
literary understandings of, 271;
psychobiology of, 294n15;
psychological understandings
of, 272, 293nn5–6, 294n13,
295n15; and recovery, 217–18,
220, 226, 228–29, 234–35, 238;
spiritual response to, 274–75; in
Wells’s fiction and film, 216–17,
219–22, 225, 228, 233, 237–38.
See also Felman, Shoshana;
incestuous abuse; trauma narratives
“Trauma and Memory” (van der
Kolk), 295n15
trauma narratives: autobiographical, 272, ethical issues around,
271–72, 274, 285–86, 289–90,
295nn18–19; importance of
imagination and creativity to,
319
280, 282–87, 292; literary characteristics of, 272, 274, 286, 288,
295n20; reader response to, 271,
274, 277, 286–90, 292, 293n4,
295n21; secondary trauma, 288–
90, 295n21; therapeutic value of,
271–72, 278–79, 285, 293n5.
See also Herman, Judith; Felman,
Shoshana: and Dori Laub
Trauma and Recovery (Herman),
293n5, 293n8
traumatic memory, 279, 280,
294n13, 295n15
traumatic repetition, 272, 279, 284,
289–90
Treat, James, 244
trickster, 88
Trinh T. Minh-ha, 251
triple goddess. See Goddess, Great:
triple
Trojans, The (opera) (Berlioz), 43
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 43
ubi sunt, 172
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma,
Narrative, and History (Caruth),
293n6
unconscious (Memoirs of a Survivor): collective, 53; communal,
53; individual, 53, 55; personal,
49. See Jung, Carl
Under My Skin (Lessing), 48)
Union Street (Barker), 27
“Uniqueness” (Levinas), 277
“Unlocking the Prison of the Past:
Childhood Trauma and Narrative in The Memoirs of a
Survivor” (Warnock), 47, 78n21,
79n33
“Up” (Atwood), 169
Updike, John, 122n6
“Useless Suffering” (Levinas),
274–76, 286
“Valentine’s Day, 2003” (Wells),
227, 240
van der Kolk, Bessel, 295n15; “The
Body, Memory, and the Psycho-
320
biology of Trauma,” 295n15;
“Trauma and Memory,” 295n15
Van Herk, Aritha: No Fixed Address: An Amorous Journey,
17–18
VanSpanckeren, Kathryn, 17, 160,
162, 153–80
Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, 50, 54
Venus, 84
“Vermillion Flycatchers, San Pedro,
Arizona” (Atwood), 169
Vickroy, Laurie, 288, 293n5,
295n20
victim/victimizer, 155, 162, 165,
169–70
Virgil: Aeneid, 163
Vizenor, Gerald, 263
voice shifts, 249, 252
Vollendungsroman, 13
Voyage In, The: Fictions of Female
Development (Abel, Hirsch, and
Langland), 21n7
Walker, Barbara G., 84, 85
Walker, Nancy A., 198n7
Walking in the Shade (Lessing), 31,
53
Walters, Anna Lee, 256
war (Robber Bride), 145–47, 150,
n27,n30
Warnock, Jeanie, 4, 6, 13, 19,
270–98; “Unlocking the Prison
of the Past: Childhood Trauma
and Narrative in The Memoirs of
a Survivor,” 47, 78n21, 79n33
Waxman, Barbara, 12; From the
Hearth to the Open Road: A
Feminist Study of Aging in
Contemporary Literature, 9, 12,
21n7; To Live in the Center of
the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of Aging, 11, 20, 22n9
Weaver, Jace, 244, 247, 265n1
Webber, Jeannette: “Doris Lessing’s
Prophetic Voice in Shikasta: Cassandra or Sibyl?,” 80n41
Weissman, M. A., 165
Weldon, Fay, 183–99; Auto da Fay,
Index
198n6; “The Changing Face of
Fiction,” 196, 198n6; Down
among the Women, 195, 199n9;
Female Friends, 199n9; oeuvre, 195, 199n10; Praxis, 195,
199n9. See also Rhode Island
Blues
Wells, Rebecca, 216, 219, 226–27,
229, 237–38; Divine Secrets of
the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 4, 6, 14,
18, 216–29, 235–40; Les divins
secrets des petites Ya-Ya, 216,
240; Little Altars Everywhere,
18, 216–18, 225, 227–40; “Valentine’s Day, 2003,” 227, 240;
The Ya-Ya Audio Collection,
227, 240; “Ya-Ya Notes from
Cane Country,” 226, 240; Ya-Yas
in Bloom, 216–17, 239–40
Well-Wrought Urn, The (Brooks),
123n24
werewolf, 84
White, Hayden, 239, 240
Whodunit (The Blind Assassin),
106–7, 107–8, 110, 112–13
Widows, The (Mayr), 11, 17–18
Wife of Bath (Chaucer), 85
Wilber, Ken, 2, 5, 6–9, 20n1; ascending and descending spirituality, 11; A Brief History of
Everything, 2, 3, 11, 21n1, 21n2,
21n4, 21n8, 77n14; Integral
Psychology: Consciousness,
Spirit, Psychology, Therapy, 3, 4,
5, 21n2, 21n3; spiritual development, stages of, 2–4, 21n
Wilson, Sharon, 6, 13, 15–16,
78n27, 83–102, 86, 92, 93, 96,
99, 123n21
Winnicott, D. W., 8, 294n9,
295n16; Playing and Reality,
295n16
Winnifred (The Blind Assassin), 132
Wisdom, 156
Witch: crone, 83, 84; in Atwood,
90; in Atwood’s oeuvre 154; in
Morning in the Burned House,
164
Index
Witch of Exmoor, The (Drabble), 27
witnessing, 278, 280–81, 286,
294n13
Women in Love (Lawrence), 123n12
women storytellers, 249, 251; griottes, 251
Woodward, Kathleen, 12, 186,
197n3, 198n4; “The Mirror
Stage of Old Age,” 7; Figuring
Age: Women, Bodies, Generation, 10
Woolf, Virginia, 97, 122n9; Between
the Acts, 122n9; A Room of
One’s Own, 27
Would You Hide Me? (Steinfeld),
229, 231, 240
Writing History, Writing Trauma
(LaCapra), 293n4, 293n7
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M., 76n2
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. and Janice
Rossen: Aging and Gender in
Literature: Studies in Creativity,
13, 76n2
Ya-Ya Audio Collection, The
(Wells), 227, 240
321
Ya-Yas in Bloom (Wells), 216–17,
239–40
“Ya-Ya Notes from Cane Country”
(Wells), 226, 240
Yeats, W. B., 97, 107, 108, 122n5,
122n8, 162; “Byzantium,”
110, 120, 123n13; “The Circus
Animals’ Desertion,” 107,
122n5; “Sailing to Byzantium,”
108, 122n8; “The Second
Coming,” 162; “The Tower,”
108, 122n8
Young, Serenity, 156
Young-Eisendrath, Polly, and Terrence Dawson: The Cambridge
Companion to Jung, 55
“Youngest Doll, The” (Ferre), 83
Yukon International Storytelling
Festival, 241, 246
Zenia (The Robber Bride), 127,
130, 132, 133, 135, 136–47,
148nn1–2, 149nn14–16,
149nn18–20, 150n22, 150n24,
150nn26–27
Zeno, 112, 113, 123n18